Explicit user profiles in web search personalisation

This paper is concerned with the issue of low quality of web search results and ways of improving it. Information sources are exponentially increasing on the web and are making it increasingly difficult to get relevant information. The quality of web search results depends on two factors: the information needs of the users and the searching techniques. In order to improve the quality of search results it is necessary to have information about user requirements. This paper attempts to address the issue of low quality of web search results through the user profiling technique, where the profiles can be explicitly specified or implicitly generated. The proposed approach in this paper is based on explicit user profiles. The implemented system allows users to create, save, remove and update profiles based on their changing information needs and preferences. Preliminary experimental results indicate that the system produces more refined results based on explicit user profiles when compared to traditional search methods.