[Search-l] [Personalized Search]

[Charlie Hull]

peter burden wrote:
> 
> That does not mean, IMHO, that there is no place for personalised 
> search. There should be an "advanced" option allowing users to specify their own 
> weights for the ranking algorithms. These would be kept and encoded on the user's machine
> and submitted as cookies, keeping them centrally requires user login and 
> poses privacy problems.

Certainly, modifying weighting is a good place to start, with the 
modifiers calculated either automatically (you could do this by looking 
at search and clickthrough history) or manually ('I like this' 
checkboxes or 'These are my interests' lists to fill out). Remember not 
all search engine cores can handle weighting modifiers well.

Another way to do this would be to harvest information in the browser or 
desktop, but people don't generally like the idea that applications on 
their PC are sending off information into the ether based on their 
habits. Autonomy tried this with their Kenjin tool (which was similar to 
something I wrote in 2000 called Webcheck) and users didn't like the idea.

Charlie