User modeling for personalized Web search with self-organizing map

The widely used Web search engines index and recommend individual Web pages in response to a few keywords queries to assist users in locating relevant documents. However, the Web search engines give different users the same answer set, although the users may have different preferences. A personalized Web search would carry out the search for each user according to his or her preferences. To conduct the personalized Web search, the authors provide a novel approach to model the user profile with a self-organizing map (SOM). Their results indicate that SOM is capable of helping the user to find the related category for each query used in the Web search to make a personalized Web search effective.