Personalized Search
Group 5
Floyd Hawkes
Kevin Oh
Clare Gunton
Lewis Bell
What is "Personalized Search"?
Personalized search is an algorithm which makes use of a
number of saved search results to “personalize” future
queries.
Over a period of 6-months, a user’s cookies are stored and
used to order search results hierarchically based on
frequently used queries.
Pro
s
First and foremost, a matter of convenience:
Learns your preferences by analyzing past searches
o Uses the information gathered about you (IN
ADDITION to the search term) to predict what
information might be useful to you
o Ex: a search for men’s shoes brings up results of
websites you frequently purchase shoes from
Location-based personalization can even further
personalize the results that you receive
o Can offer the locations of stores and services near
you
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Pros (cont'd)
Quality of search results can be improved based on
suggestions from trusted members of your social
networks.
What about the security of your personal information?
o In particular Google allows you to turn the
personalized search option off and on, in addition
to clearing your stored history at any given time if
you feel it has been compromised.
In the end it all comes down to convenience and
personalized search puts the results a user is more
likely to want directly at their fingertips.
Cons
Invasion of privacy
Many people do not like the feeling of their
information being stored regardless of what is done
with it
Many search sites share your information with other
sites, organizations or businesses for "processing" or
"legal" reasons
No matter how tight a search sites' security is,
protection against hackers is never completely certain
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Cons (cont'd)
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A major flaw with personalization is that it is only
truly effective when a user has made numerous past
searches
Personalized algorithms use users' history to predict
future ones, but this in fact creates the problem of
limited search
o This dependence on past searches severely limits
the results of future searches to similar answers
 Instead of providing the user with new and
unvisited sites these algorithms end up
impacting the searches users would tend to be
most familiar with already