An overview of personalization in web search

Web services technology is widely used as a solution of information by all users. Now a days, the user rely on web for the information need but the currently available search engines though using sophisticated document indexing algorithms, quite often gives a long list of results, much of which are not always relevant to the user´s requirement. Since a user has a specific goal when searching for information, personalized search may provide the results that accurately satisfy user´s specific goal and intent for the search. Personalization of web search is to retrieve information according to user´s interests which may be inferred from user´s actions, browsed documents or past query history etc. This paper conducts a survey of how personalization (if applied) can give useful knowledge to the user. Several user personalization approaches and techniques developed for the information retrieval domain are illustrated in this paper.