The Biz of Coding

How Search Personalization Works — Primer

by Ujwal Tickoo on October 26th, 2006

Delicious, Stumble Upon, Google Personalized Search, Yahoo! My Web, RSS Readers — new (Personalized) Search Websites, tools, and toolbars keep popping-up. If you are interested to try out some of these cool new product but unsure about how they work or want to know which would be most useful for you — dive in. At the outset most of these tools/websites try to reduce the amount of search queries you would need to fire. They either help you discover new interesting websites or try to recommend websites that would be relevant to you.

At a fundamental level most personalized search tools work on one (or all) of the following three pieces of information to find out what is relevant to you: (1) Who you are (2) People in your network (3) Information Sources you trust / frequent

1) Your Profie — Who you are, Your interest areas, Age etc.

Stumble Upon promises to help you discover new websites, videos, pictures etc — based upon your interests. Quite clearly you need to sign-up and create a profile checking boxes about your interest areas. Then the Stumble Upon toolbar tracks the websites visited by registered users of the product – while ranking the websites in some order. Those websites that also match your interest areas are considered relevant to you and hence recommended for a check-out. 

2) People in your network – Yahoo! My Web lets you add bookmarks online and also see the bookmarks of those people who are connected to you. The assumption is that you will invite those people who have interests that are relevant to you. Therefore, the bookmarks of those in your network would be of interest to you. You would thus discover new websites through the interesting finds of your friends/network.

Example: Lets say that you are interested in movie reviews, new Thai recipes, and UFOs. If you simply save bookmarks of websites that you find interesting on Yahoo! MyWeb — then thats all you have. However, if you invite your friends who are movie buffs, foodies and UFO searchers to join you on MyWeb – very soon you will have a large pool of websites bookmarked — shared by your friends.

Delicious and Yahoo! MyWeb also help you discover web-sites bookmarked by others — having a specific "tag" that interests you.

3) Information Sources You Trust/Frequent — Most common use of this approach is RSS readers. You add a RSS feed of a website or blog that you like into your RSS reader — My Yahoo!, News Gator, Google Reader etc. Next time a website or blog updates itself, you get to know about the change.

There are several Personalized Search Engines that use a hybrid of these three approaches. My goal in this post was to help you decide which approach would work for you. Happy Searching!

POSTED IN: RSS, Search, Social Search, Web 2.0, Web Search