Single-party private web search

Web search engines profile their users by storing and analyzing their past searches. Profiles reflect the interests of the users and enable web search engines to offer a better service. In this way, search results are personalized to fulfill the expectations of each individual user. Nevertheless, this service is not provided without cost. User profiles contain information that can be considered private and personal. This represents a serious privacy threat which must be addressed. Several privacy-preserving techniques which try to prevent this situation can be found in the literature. In this paper, we focus on those that work directly in the computer of the users without requiring any external entity. More specifically, we propose a new single-party scheme that addresses the trade-off between privacy and quality of service but it does not require any change at the server side. The performance of this new method has been evaluated using real search queries extracted from the AOL´s files. The results achieved show that our proposal works as expected and it can be considered a proper option for those users who are concerned about their privacy.