Exploiting web browsing histories to identify user needs

Abstract

Browsing activities are an important source of information to build profiles of the user interests and personalize the human-computer interaction during information seeking tasks. Visited pages are easily collectible, e.g., from browsers' histories and toolbars, or desktop search tools, and they often contain documents related to the current user needs. Nevertheless, menus, advertisements or pages that cover multiple topics affect negatively the advantages of an implicit feedback technique that exploits these data to build and keep updated user profiles. This work describes a technique to collect text relevant to the current needs from sequences of pages visited by the user. The evaluation shows how it outperforms other techniques that consider the whole page contents. We also introduce an improvement based on machine learning techniques that is currently under evaluation. Copyright 2007 ACM.