Personalizing Search Based on User Profile by Using Anonymization

The search engine becomes the most important gateway for ordinary people who are looking for useful information on the web. In spite of, users might sense failure when search engines return inappropriate results that do not meet their real objectives. Such inappropriateness is largely due to the variety of users contexts and backgrounds, as well as the uncertainty of texts. Personalized web search (PWS) is a type of search techniques which aims at providing better search results, which are restricted to individual user needs. The existing web search does not support runtime profiling. A user profile is mostly generalized for only once offline and used to personalize all queries from the same user. The existing methods do not concern for the customization of privacy requirements. Because of that, some user privacy is overprotected while others partly protected. The proposed UPS framework generalizes profiles for each query given to user-specified privacy specification. Online generalization on user profiles is performed to protect the personal privacy without compromising the search quality. K-anonymization technique is used to anonymize attributes of users profile like age and zip code. This proposed technique improves the security of user profile.