Robert Drum
CPS 49s
12 April 2007
Discussion Report: Personalization
Yahoo’s Three Examples of Personalization.
The first example of Yahoo’s personalization experience is My Yahoo! which is a
personalized version of a Yahoo! home page. Many news feeds and information sources
can be selected to appear on this page. News, Stocks, and Sports are among the types of
options available. These information feeds are updated automatically keeping the most
current news from each source available on your personalized page. Yahoo has made it
easy to add, delete, or edit any item on a personalized page. Info can be added from any
yahoo page directly to your personalized page. Once it is on your page it can be edited to
present info in a certain way. If you ever get tired of a news feed then all you have to do
is click the “x box” in the top right corner to delete it. The My Yahoo! page will ask for a
zip code. When you enter your zip code Yahoo will automatically use it to provide local
information such as weather, local show times for theaters, and information on local
sports teams. However, content is not the only thing that is customizable on a My Yahoo!
page. The layout, background, and color schemes can be customized to meet a users
needs as well. This type of personalized page is very useful as a homepage, but what
about when a user is surfing the web?
Yahoo’s second tool is designed to accommodate just such a situation. Yahoo!
Companion is in the form of a tool bar at the top of the browser, and is essentially a mini
version of Yahoo accessible from anywhere on the web. A user can select from two
interfaces for this tool, regular or stock market. Bookmarks and all other settings can be
stored on this companion. All personalized information is stored directly on the Yahoo
server which allows users to access it from any computer.
The final way that Yahoo has incorporated personalization into there web site is
much simpler. In an inside Yahoo search such as a search for movie times, a user is
offered a result linking to a site within the Yahoo directory. This site will offer
information about the movie and even a preview of it. The personalization comes into
play when a user wants to actually go see the movie. If the user has ever entered in his/or
zip code on a Yahoo page, then when he/she clicks movie times, he/she will be given
local theaters showing the movie and current show times. This is a less pronounced, less
complex form of personalization but still very useful.
General Observations and Lessons Learned by Yahoo
Yahoo has observed some consistent trends in personalization. First, most users
do not take advantage of customization either because they do not feel the need to
personalize a home page or because they cannot figure out how to do so. Because people
do not often customize, the default page should be as outstanding as possible in order to
please the masses that do not customize. However, there are always those who take full
advantage of services offered and use all available resources. It is for these users that
Yahoo makes it a policy to design their pages for infinite growth. When these users
spend so much time customizing a page and making it as useful to them as possible there
personalized information should be accessible to them in any location. That is why
Yahoo stores personalization information on a server and goes through a great deal of
trouble to both protect the server and maintain an up to date back up server in case of an
emergency. In general most users do not understand the concept of personalization
because it was previously not possible. In order to promote this new technology it must
be made available to users across the world and across various platforms. Also, in order
to accommodate users, the developers of this technology must constantly check and
review the logs of user activity to observe how the technology is utilized in real world
situations. The overall conclusion from the Yahoo developers was that, “The entry bar
must be lowered to allow lower level users to experience the same benefits it must be
made clear that personalization is possible.” If it is made clear that personalization is
useful and possible then both Yahoo and its users will benefit greatly.
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Personalized Search
The movement towards contextual search is the future of search technology.
Moving from consensus relevancy to personal specific relevancy will greatly enhance the
abilities of searchers to quickly and effortlessly find information that they are looking for.
In the past information retrieval through search has been limited to citation and hyperlink
techniques. Many new techniques have been developed and utilized by a new
personalized information retrieval system.
The Outride Approach
The Outride Approach to search combines both contextualization and
personalization in order to return results based on personal relevancy. There are two
main ways that Outride does this.
The first is Query augmentation. This involves a separate query augmentation
engine that sits between the user and the actual search engine. An example is given to
illustrate this concept.
“A user is looking at a series of pages on car information queries “contour” the system
may augment the query by adding the term “car” or “ford” to provide the user with
results from prior searches”
The augmentation engine takes into account the pages that the user has recently viewed.
This allows it to add relevant query terms to the query entered the search engine which
helps it to be more likely to return results that are relevant to the context of the search.
The search augmentation engine will not augment the search if a user does not want it to
or if the topic of the search is new.
The second method of producing personally relevant results is result re-ranking.
Users of this personalization system create profiles detailing their demographics, and
personal interests among other things. By indexing the metadata such as titles of web
pages the search engine can cross web page metadata with data contained in a users
profile by vector methods in order to re-rank result in order of personal relevancy.
Results can also be ranked using multiple profiles or even all profiles. This may be the
most efficient way of ranking results in a personal way but there are other strategies used
in the re-ranking of results. They can also be ranked using factors like how long a user is
on a page, how often a user visits a page, and how recently a user visited a page. In
addition to these strategies the Outride system can be told to show only results that have
been viewed by the user before or results that have never been viewed by the user. This
allows for easy recall of information as well as search for new information
Open Directory Project
The ODP as it is called weights the sites visited and the list of favorite links of a
user across the top 1,000 categories of this open directory project. This helps to create
the user model used in query augmentation and result set processing.
The Interface
The interface of the Outride system appears as a sidebar on an internets browser.
It is constantly open and available for use. This sidebar contains four fully searchable
and browsable tabs. These tabs include a personal list of a user’s links, a directories list
of links, a users web surfing history, and entire web results.
Testing
The Outride system was tested to see if it really expedited the process of
information retrieval. The results showed clearly that Outride allowed both computer
novices and computer experts to find results faster both in number of actions and in time
elapsed. Outride allowed its users to find the information that they wanted in about half
the time. Also, an astounding find was that novices using Outride were faster than
experts using any other engine.
The Future
Some challenges arise when using Outride personalized search. For one, user’s
interests are constantly changing. This may hinder the abilities of Outride to augment
queries and re-rank results. Also, issues such as privacy and ability to share results arise.
These issues and a number of other problems that arise can be fixed by simply turning off
the features that a user does not need at the time. The problems of the Outride system are
few and easily fixed and the benefits are great. The future of search is certainly in the
move towards personalization, and in the ability of an engine to produce personally
relevant results.