Personalization Approaches for Ranking: A Review and Research Experiments

Search engine technologies are evolving to satisfy the user's ever increasing information need; but are yet to achieve perfection especially in ranking. With the exponential growth in the available information on the internet; ranking has become vital for satisfactory search experience. User satisfaction can be ensured to some extent by personalizing the search results based on user preferences which can be explicitly stated or learned from user's search behavior. Machine learning algorithms which predict user preference from the available information related to the user are extensively experimented for personalization. Among several studies undertaken for re-ranking the documents, many focus on the user. Such approaches create user model to capture the search context and behavior. This study attempts to analyze the research trends in user model based personalization and discuss experimental results in personalized information retrieval area. The authors experimented to extend the state of the art in the specific areas of personalization.