We formulate and study search algorithms that consider a user’s prior interactions with a wide variety of content to personalize that user’s current Web search. Rather than relying on the unrealistic assumption that people will precisely specify their intent when searching, we pursue techniques that leverage implicit information about the user’s interests. This information is used to re-rank Web search results within a relevance feedback framework. We explore rich models of user interests, built from both search-related information, such as previously issued queries and previously visited Web pages, and other information about the user such as documents and email the user has read and created. Our research suggests that rich representations of the user and the corpus are important for personalization, but that it is possible to approximate these representations and provide efficient client-side algorithms for personalizing search. We show that such personalization algorithms can significantly improve on current Web search.

User modeling for information retrieval has mostly been studied to improve the effectiveness of information access in centralized repositories. In this paper we explore user modeling in the context of full-text federated search in peer-to-peer networks. Our approach models a user’s persistent, long-term interests based on past queries, and uses the model to improve search efficiency for future queries that represent interests similar to past queries. Our approach also enables queries representing a user’s transient, ad-hoc interests to be automatically recognized so that search for these queries can rely on a relatively large search radius to avoid sacrificing effectiveness for efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve the efficiency of full-text federated search without degrading its accuracy. Furthermore, the proposed approach does not require a large amount of training data, and is robust to a range of parameter values.

Every user has a distinct background and a specific goal when searching for information on the Web. The goal of Web search personalization is to tailor search results to a particular user based on that user’s interests and preferences. Effective personalization of information access involves two important challenges: accurately identifying the user context and organizing the information in such a way that matches the particular context. We present an approach to personalized search that involves building models of user context as ontological profiles by assigning implicitly derived interest scores to existing concepts in a domain ontology. A spreading activation algorithm is used to maintain the interest scores based on the user’s ongoing behavior. Our experiments show that re-ranking the search results based on the interest scores and the semantic evidence in an ontological user profile is effective in presenting the most relevant results to the user.

Web search engines typically provide search results without considering user interests or context. We propose a personalized search approach that can easily extend a conventional search engine on the client side. Our mapping framework automatically maps a set of known user interests onto a group of categories in the Open Directory Project (ODP) and takes advantage of manually edited data available in ODP for training text classifiers that correspond to, and therefore categorize and personalize search results according to user interests. In two sets of controlled experiments, we compare our personalized categorization system (PCAT) with a list interface system (LIST) that mimics a typical search engine and with a nonpersonalized categorization system (CAT). In both experiments, we analyze system performances on the basis of the type of task and query length. We find that PCAT is preferable to LIST for information gathering types of tasks and for searches with short queries, and PCAT outperforms CAT in both information gathering and finding types of tasks, and for searches associated with free-form queries. From the subjects ’ answers to a questionnaire, we find that PCAT is perceived as a system that can find relevant Web pages quicker and easier

In Web-based services of dynamic content (such as news articles), recommender systems face the difficulty of timely identifying new items of high-quality and providing recommendations for new users. We propose a feature-based machine learning approach to personalized recommendation that is capable of handling the cold-start issue effectively. We maintain profiles of content of interest, in which temporal characteristics of the content, e.g. popularity and freshness, are updated in real-time manner. We also maintain profiles of users including demographic information and a summary of user activities within Yahoo! properties. Based on all features in user and content profiles, we develop predictive bilinear regression models to provide accurate personalized recommendations of new items for both existing and new users. This approach results in an offline model with light computational overhead compared with other recommender systems that require online re-training. The proposed framework is general and flexible for other personalized tasks. The superior performance of our approach is verified on a large-scale data set collected from the Today-Module on Yahoo! Front Page, with comparison against six competitive approaches.

Query logs, the patterns of activity left by millions of users, contain a wealth of information that can be mined to aid personalization. We perform a large-scale study of Yahoo! search engine logs, tracking 1.35 million browser-cookies over a period of 6 months. We define metrics to address questions such as 1) How much history is available?, 2) How do users ’ topical interests vary, as reflected by their queries?, and 3) What can we learn from user clicks? We find that there is significantly more expected history for the user of a randomly picked query than for a randomly picked user. We show that users exhibit consistent topical interests that vary between users. We also see that user clicks indicate a variety of special interests. Our findings shed light on user activity and can inform future personalization efforts.

General information retrieval systems are designed to serve all users without considering individual needs. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to personalized search. It can, in a unified way, exploit and utilize implicit feedback information, such as query logs and immediately viewed documents. Moreover, our approach can implement result re-ranking and query expansion simultaneously and collaboratively. Based on this approach, we develop a client-side personalized web search agent PAIR (Personalized Assistant for Information Retrieval), which supports both English and Chinese. Our experiments on TREC and HTRDP collections clearly show that the new approach is both effective and efficient. 1

Personalized web search is a promising way to improve search quality by customizing search results for people with individual information goals. However, users are uncomfortable with exposing private preference information to search engines. On the other hand, privacy is not absolute, and often can be compromised if there is a gain in service or profitability to the user. Thus, a balance must be struck between search quality and privacy protection. This paper presents a scalable way for users to automatically build rich user profiles. These profiles summarize a user’s interests into a hierarchical organization according to specific interests. Two parameters for specifying privacy requirements are proposed to help the user to choose the content and degree of detail of the profile information that is exposed to the search engine. Experiments showed that the user profile improved search quality when compared to standard MSN rankings. More importantly, results verified our hypothesis that a significant improvement on search quality can be achieved by only sharing some higher-level user profile information, which is potentially less sensitive than detailed personal information.

Abstract. Web users use search engine to find useful information on the Internet. However current web search engines return answer to a query independent of specific user information need. Since web users with similar web behaviors tend to acquire similar information when they submit a same query, these unseen factors can be used to improve search result. In this paper we present an approach that mines these unseen factors from web logs to personalized web search. Our approach is based on probabilistic latent semantic analysis, a model based technique that is used to analyze co-occurrence data. Experimental results on real data collected by MSN search engine show the improvements over traditional web search. 1

Abstract—Every user has a distinct background and a specific goal when searching for information on the Web. The goal of Web search personalization is to tailor search results to a particular user based on that user’s interests and preferences. Effective personalization of information access involves two important challenges: accurately identifying the user context, and organizing the information in such a way that matches the particular context. We present an approach to personalized search that involves modeling the user context as ontological profiles by assigning implicitly derived interest scores to existing concepts in a domain ontology. A spreading activation algorithm is used to maintain and incrementally update the interest scores based on the user’s ongoing behavior. Our experiments show that re-ranking the search results based on the interest scores and the semantic evidence captured in an ontological user profile enables an adaptive system to present the most relevant results to the user.