New Generation Computing, 28(2010)73-94
Ohmsha, Ltd. and Springer
Received 15 December 2008
Revised manuscript received 5 August 2009
A universal search engine is unable to provide a personal touch to a user query. To overcome the deficiency of a universal search engine, vertical search engines are used, which return search results from a specific domain. An alternate option is to use a personalized search system. In our endeavor to provide personalized search results, the proposed system, Exclusively Your’s, observes a user browsing behavior and his actions. Based on the observed user behavior, it dynamically constructs user profile which consists of some terms that are related to user’s interest. The constructed profile is later used for query expansion. The goal of research work in this paper is not to provide all the relevant results, but a few high quality personalized search results at the top of ranked list, which in other words means high precision. We performed experiments by personalizing Google, Yahoo, and Naver (widely used search engine in Korea). The results show that using Exclusively Your’s, a search engine yields significant improvement. We also compared the user profile constructed by the proposed approach with other similar personalization approaches; the results show a marginal increase in precision.
Keywords:Search Engine, Personalization, Summarization, Weighted Index, Anchor Text, Hyperlink.