Domain-specific queries and Web search personalization: some investigations

Major search engines deploy personalized Web results to enhance users' experience, by showing them data supposed to be relevant to their interests. Even if this process may bring benefits to users while browsing, it also raises concerns on the selection of the search results. In particular, users may be unknowingly trapped by search engines in protective information bubbles, called "filter bubbles", which can have the undesired effect of separating users from information that does not fit their preferences. This paper moves from early results on quantification of personalization over Google search query results. Inspired by previous works, we have carried out some experiments consisting of search queries performed by a battery of Google accounts with differently prepared profiles. Matching query results, we quantify the level of personalization, according to topics of the queries and the profile of the accounts. This work reports initial results and it is a first step a for more extensive investigation to measure Web search personalization.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2015, arXiv:1508.0338

The Potential of Bookmark Based User Profiles

Driven by the explosive growth of information available online, the World-Wide-Web is currently witnessing a trend towards personalized information access. As part of this trend, numerous personalized news services are emerging. The goal of this project is to develop a prototype algorithm for using bookmarks to develop a personal profile. Ultimately, we imagine this might be used to construct a personalized RSS reader for reading news online. A reader returns a large number of news stories. To increase user satisfaction it is useful to rank them to bring the most interesting to the fore. This ranking is done by implementing a personalized profile. One way to create such a profile might be to extract it from user's bookmarks. In this paper, we describe a process for learning user interest from bookmarks and present an evaluation of its effectiveness. The goal is to utilize a user profile based on bookmarks to personalize results by filtering and re-ranking the entries returned from a set of user defined feeds