Personalization is a commonly used technique by search engines to return more cu

Question

Personalization is a commonly used technique by search engines to return more customized search results based on individual users’ preferences. For example, if a user’s query is “apple” and we know that the user is a computer engineering, then search engines would return results relevant to the Apple product (such as Mac) rather than the pages relevant to the fruit. One possible way of capturing a search user’s preferences is to use his/previous queries and click-through information (i.e., which pages have been clicked for the previous queries). Please propose a design for a personalized search engine that can use the past queries and click-through information to personalize search results. Discuss the pros and cons of your solution.

Explanation / Answer

Answer)

Personalization is a technique by which websites and search engines return more customized search results based on individual users’ preferences. Thus we need to design the website or search engine in such as ways that it understands user's requirements and captures the user preferences to use his/previous queries and click-through information i.e. which category of pages were visited previously, and thus store the information for future results searching. There are several methods and criteria to design for a personalized search engine that can use the past queries and click-through information to personalize search results such as:

a) Use of Location Personalization which uses the user's location and country and region to personalize the results.

b) Use if Interface Based Personalization - where if you're using some device with a specific interface, then results related to that are used. For example, if you're using Android device, then apps may show results for Android Play store.

c) History Based Personalization is used to personalize the user experience where results are shown in a mode for Querying the history of the user.

d) Usage of Time Based Personalization such as you get more updates at times and less updates or irrelevant search results are filtered out at other times.

e) Usage of User Behavior Based Personalization lets us store the personalized results in the database of the service provider based on past experiences, using cache memory based on the search results on the user's computer.

f) Using Social Search Based Personalization also lets the search provider to analyze the interests of the user and show relevant results to him.

g) Asking the user for their interest areas and groups they want to be involved in, to get updates and get search result related to that.

Pros of the solution are:

All of the above might be deemed as pros of the solution when we use:

location

Time zones of the user

History of the user

User behavior

User interests

and thus make use of the above information to personalize search results.

The cons are:

A new user will have to take some time before personalization can be effective for him.

Thus new users will have to create a history before personalization can occur in his case.

Also, if cache memory is used for personalization, clearing cache also leads to problems.

User information and accesses are required from the user to achieve personalization.

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