Web search personalization via social bookmarking and tagging

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new approach to web search personalization based on user collaboration and sharing of information about web documents. The proposed personalization technique separates data collection and user profiling from the information system whose contents and indexed documents are being searched for, i.e. the search engines, and uses social bookmarking and tagging to re-rank web search results. It is independent of the search engine being used, so users are free to choose the one they prefer, even if their favorite search engine does not natively support personalization. We show how to design and implement such a system in practice and investigate its feasibility and usefulness with large sets of real-word data and a user study. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.