Northeastern University · Social Urban Network Lab

Discover how AI shapes your city.

Help Northeastern University researchers uncover how Google Maps personalizes restaurant recommendations across Boston neighborhoods. The AI-scapes Chrome extension runs four guided searches — once with your account, once incognito — and compares what the algorithm shows.

Download the extension (.zip)
Installation guides: macOS Windows Linux

[DRAFT — REPLACE BEFORE LAUNCH] Pending IRB approval. Do not share this URL publicly until placeholders are resolved.

About the study

Why AI-scapes?

Search and recommendation algorithms increasingly mediate how people experience their cities — which restaurants they discover, which neighborhoods feel familiar, which businesses get foot traffic. Yet most of this personalization is invisible to the people it shapes.

AI-scapes is a research project investigating how Google Maps adapts restaurant recommendations to individual users, and whether those adaptations reinforce socioeconomic patterns at the neighborhood level. The extension records what you see while signed in and compares it to what an anonymous visitor would see in the same query.

Your participation contributes to peer-reviewed research on algorithmic personalization, urban segregation, and platform transparency.

Participation

Participate in 3 easy steps

The whole study takes about 10–15 minutes. You install the extension once, sign in, and let it run four searches automatically.

Install

Download the .zip file and load it in Chrome's Developer Mode. We provide a step-by-step guide for your operating system.

macOS guide  ·  Windows guide  ·  Linux guide

Set up

Sign in with your Google account and toggle Allow in Incognito on the extension settings page so the comparison search can run privately.

Run

Click Start study. The extension opens four guided searches across Downtown, the Shopping District, Harvard Square, and Jamaica Plain — and submits structured, pseudonymous results when done.

Chrome extension settings page showing the Allow in Incognito toggle switched on.
The one Chrome setting the extension needs — toggle Allow in Incognito on the extension's details page.
Data & privacy

Your privacy first

AI-scapes is designed so we never need to identify you personally. Every safeguard below is enforced in code you can read.

Pseudonymous data

We collect a randomly-generated installation identifier — never your name, email, IP address, or Google profile. The identifier cannot be linked back to you without the extension itself.

Open source & auditable

The extension's full source code is published. Permissions are limited to google.com/maps/* and the lab's submission endpoint. Anyone can inspect what the extension does before installing it.

No background tracking

The extension only activates when you explicitly click Start study. It does not run continuously, does not track your browsing, and closes its search windows automatically when each query completes.

Want the full details? Read the privacy & data-handling notice.

Who we are

The Social Urban Network Lab

We are a research group at Northeastern University's Network Science Institute studying how digital platforms reshape urban life — from search algorithms to delivery networks to mobility data.

AI-scapes is led by Prof. Esteban Moro and conducted under IRB protocol [DRAFT — REPLACE BEFORE LAUNCH IRB#]. If you have questions about your rights as a research participant, contact Northeastern University's Office of Human Subject Research Protection.