Personalized search based on user search histories

@inproceedings{citeulike:1109408, abstract = {User profiles, descriptions of user interests, can be used by search engines to provide personalized search results. Many approaches to creating user profiles collect user information through proxy servers (to capture browsing histories) or desktop bots (to capture activities on a personal computer). Both these techniques require participation of the user to install the proxy server or the bot. In this study, we explore the use of a less-invasive means of gathering user information for personalized search. In particular, we build user profiles based on activity at the search site itself and study the use of these profiles to provide personalized search results. By implementing a wrapper around the Google search engine, we were able to collect information about individual user search activities. In particular, we collected the queries for which at least one search result was examined, and the snippets (titles and summaries) for each examined result. User profiles were created by classifying the collected information (queries or snippets) into concepts in a reference concept hierarchy. These profiles were then used to re-rank the search results and the rank-order of the user-examined results before and after re-ranking were compared. Our study found that user profiles based on queries were as effective as those based on snippets. We also found that our personalized re-ranking resulted in a 34\% improvement in the rankorder of the user-selected results.}, author = {Speretta, M. and Gauch, S. }, citeulike-article-id = {1109408}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/WI.2005.114}, journal = {Web Intelligence, 2005. Proceedings. The 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on}, keywords = {a, ir, personalization, related\_work, reordering, taxonomy, usage\_history, web}, month = {September}, pages = {622--628}, posted-at = {2007-05-07 11:25:52}, priority = {5}, title = {Personalized search based on user search histories}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/WI.2005.114}, year = {2005} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:1109408 L3 - citeulike-article-id:1109408 TI - Personalized search based on user search histories JF - Web Intelligence, 2005. Proceedings. The 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on SP - 622 EP - 628 N2 - User profiles, descriptions of user interests, can be used by search engines to provide personalized search results. Many approaches to creating user profiles collect user information through proxy servers (to capture browsing histories) or desktop bots (to capture activities on a personal computer). Both these techniques require participation of the user to install the proxy server or the bot. In this study, we explore the use of a less-invasive means of gathering user information for personalized search. In particular, we build user profiles based on activity at the search site itself and study the use of these profiles to provide personalized search results. By implementing a wrapper around the Google search engine, we were able to collect information about individual user search activities. In particular, we collected the queries for which at least one search result was examined, and the snippets (titles and summaries) for each examined result. User profiles were created by classifying the collected information (queries or snippets) into concepts in a reference concept hierarchy. These profiles were then used to re-rank the search results and the rank-order of the user-examined results before and after re-ranking were compared. Our study found that user profiles based on queries were as effective as those based on snippets. We also found that our personalized re-ranking resulted in a 34% improvement in the rankorder of the user-selected results. KW - a KW - ir KW - personalization KW - related_work KW - reordering KW - taxonomy KW - usage_history KW - web AU - Speretta, M AU - Gauch, S PY - 2005/09/19-22/ UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/WI.2005.114 ER -