Personalized search

Personalized search refers to search experiences that are tailored specifically to an individual's interests by incorporating information about the individual beyond specific query provided. Pitkow et al. describe two general approaches to personalizing search results, one involving modifying the user’s query and the other re-ranking search results.^[1]

While many search engines take advantage of information about people in general, or about specific groups of people, personalized search depends on a user profile that is unique to the individual. Research systems that personalize search results model their users in different ways. Some rely on users explicitly specifying their interests or on demographic/cognitive characteristics.^[2][3] But user supplied information can be hard to collect and keep up to date. Others have built implicit user models based on content the user has read or their history of interaction with Web pages.^{[4][5][6][7][8]}

There are several publicly available systems for personalizing Web search results (e.g., Google Personalized Search and Bing's search result personalization^[9]). However, the technical details and evaluations of these commercial systems are proprietary.

References

1. ^ Pitokow, James; Hinrich Schütze, Todd Cass, Rob Cooley, Don Turnbull, Andy Edmonds, Eytan Adar, Thomas Breuel (2002). "Personalized search". Communications of the ACM (CACM) 45 (9): 50–55. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=567498.567526. 
2. ^ Ma, Z.; Pant, G., and Sheng, O. (2007). "Interest-based personalized search.". ACM TOIS 25 (5). 
3. ^ Frias-Martinez, E.; Chen, S.Y., and Liu, X. (2007). "Automatic cognitive style identification of digital library users for personalization.". JASIST 58 (2): 237–251. 
4. ^ Chirita, P.; Firan, C., and Nejdl, W. (2006). "Summarizing local context to personalize global Web search". SIGIR: 287–296. 
5. ^ Dou, Z.; Song, R., and Wen, J.R. (2007). "A large-scale evaluation and analysis of personalized search strategies". WWW: 581–590. 
6. ^ Shen, X.; Tan, B. and Zhai, C.X. (2005). "Implicit user modeling for personalized search". CIKM: 824–831. 
7. ^ Sugiyama, K.; Hatano, K., and Yoshikawa, M. (2004). "Adaptive web search based on user profile constructed without any effort from the user". WWW: 675–684. 
8. ^ Teevan, J.; Dumais, S.T., and Horvitz, E. (2005). "Personalizing search via automated analysis of interests and activities". SIGIR: 415–422. http://people.csail.mit.edu/teevan/work/publications/papers/tochi10.pdf. 
9. ^ Crook, Aidan, and Sanaz Ahari. "Making search yours". http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/02/10/making-search-yours.aspx. Retrieved 14 March 2011.