<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
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Saturday, December 11, 2004  

The Best Search Personalization Is Done By Users
http://news.com.com/Narrowing+the+search/2010-1038_3-5460452.html

A tremendous amount of scientific effort is being expended on devising search algorithms designed to turn up results more relevant to what the user is actually seeking, but some experts say true search personalization has several inherent problems. For starters, people are not static -- their interests change constantly. The data used for personalizing search is unreliable -- how much can you really tell by someone's surfing habits? And how often do you click on a Web page, only to find it's not what you were looking for at all? Meanwhile, home computers are often shared by several people, whose surfing habits obviously differ. To top it all off, most queries are oversimplistic -- how much information could you infer from a two-word conversation with your spouse? Given these weaknesses, some companies are looking at ways to enable searchers to more quickly peruse a set of results, giving them a primary role in the personalization process. One approach is to cluster the results into possibly overlapping categories that can be displayed as folders, subfolders, etc. Other programs display clusters as spatial or temporal objects that are displayed on the computer screen in various dimensions with a time component. Another approach skips the clustering step and directly embeds the search results in to a map of some sort, possibly with an added time dimension. Which is best? Whichever one works best for you -- that's what search personalization is all about.

posted by Marcus Zillman | 4:00 AM
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