Web search personalization using ontological user profiles

Abstract

In web, users with different interest and goal enter queries to the search engine. Search engines provide all these users with the same search results irrespective of their context and interest. Therefore, the user has to browse through many results most of which are irrelevant to his goal. Personalization of search results involves understanding the user’s preferences based on his interaction and then re-ranking the search results to provide more relevant searches. We present a method for search engine to personalize search results leading to better search experience. In this method, a user profile is generated using reference ontology. The user profile is updated dynamically with interest scores whenever, he clicks on awebpage. With the help of these interest scores in the user profile, the search results are reranked to give personalized results. Our experimental results show that personalized search results are effective and efficient.