Search Engines Personalization

Taly Sharon and Ariel Frank

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Google and Yahoo Control the Market!

Share of Searches

December 2004

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Problem: Search is not Sticky! Google is offering Gmail. Yahoo has acquired Stata Labs (startup)

Bloomba e-mail. SAproxy spam-blocking

technology.

A new (old) front: Personalization

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What in the Presentation?

What is personalization? Areas for personalization Who personalizes? Personalization

challenges

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What is Personalization? WordNet Dictionary Adj.1.personalised –

made for or directed or adjusted to a particular individual;"personalized luggage"; "personalized advice" Synonyms: individualised, individualized, personalized

Related Wordsindividualised, individualized, personal, personalized

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Web Pages Personalization On a Web site, personalization is the

process of tailoring pages to individual users' characteristics or preferences.

Involves customizing some feature of a product or service so that the customer enjoys more convenience, lower cost, or some other benefit.

http://searchsap.techtarget.com/gDefinition/0,294236,sid21_gci532341,00.html

www.personalization.org

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A More Practical Definition

Personalization is a combination of customization which includes: explicit preferences and an implied

storage for every user, and contextualization, where an

application knows about a task and offers a task-specific meaning or infers from user behavior what the user is trying to do. 

http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-45-20040803YahooTalksPersonalizedSearch.html

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Types of Personalization0. Preferences (set results number to max:-)1. My/Personalized homepage2. Local/Geographic search3. User Interface/Visualization4. Personalize/Settings5. Downloading/Localization

• Explorer Buttons• Toolbars• Desktop/Personal• Alerts

6. Memory/History – “save search” or “save results”

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1 .MyMyYahoo: What Will Yours Do?

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MyMSN

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Google Personalized Homepage

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So what was the message ?

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2 .Local/Geographic Search

Google Local/Maps (also ca,uk, mobile)

Yahoo Maps did it a long time ago…

A9 does it differently

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Google Local

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Google Local Search Result

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Google – Satellite

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3 .User Interface/Visualization

A few examples MSN Search Builder Clusters/Grouping/Maps

Vivisimo/Clusty Mooter/CartOO/WebBrain

A9 Display

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MSN Search Builder

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MSNבונה שאילתות גם בעברית

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Clusty

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Mooter

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KartOO

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WebBrain

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A9

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4 .Personalized Search

Google Personalized Google Suggest

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Google Personalized setup

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Google Personalized Search

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Google Personalized Search

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Theory vs. Practice!?

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Yahoo Personals? Oops…

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Google Suggest (1)

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Google Suggest (2)

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5 .Downloading/Localization Explorer Buttons Toolbars Desktop/Personal Alerts

Want Toolbars?

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Desktop Search Searches PC desktop Integrate results in SE searches Timeline:

October 14: Google Desktop released December 13: MSN toolbar suite December 15: Ask Jeeves desktop search due January 31: Yahoo desktop search due Sometime In 2005: AOL's combined browser

and desktop search should be out at some point

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GoogleAlert

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Yahoo!Alerts

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6 .Memory/History/Save Search A9 MyAskJeeves MySearch.Yahoo

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A9 (top)

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A9 (bottom)

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MyJeeves

http://sp.ask.com/docs/mj/tour4.html

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MySearch.Yahoo

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What’s Next?

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Human Search Engine?

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Google Answers

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AskYahoo!

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Also in Israel - AskZeev

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Wondir, Answers.com (and Ask/Brainboost)

An attempt to give an answer to a question and not documents for a query.

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Wondir

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Answers.com

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Who Personalizes (all?) Amazon/A9 – history, presentation, local Google – local/map, Desktop,

Personalized, Personalized-Homepage, GoogleAlert, History.

Yahoo – local/map, myYahoo, mySearch AskJeeves – Saved Searches MSN – Toolbar+Desktop, presentation,

question answering *All have Toolbars

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Challenges Search is temporal.

Just because people search for something doesn't mean they are truly interested in it.

For example, if you're sick and search for information on a particular medicine, that doesn't mean you are always going to be interested in finding information on that medicine.

Multiple users share a computer? A user performs a search for a friend? requires user effort to be successful. Privacy Issues.

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Questions?