New constructions and practical applications for private stream searching

A system for private stream searching allows a client to retrieve documents matching some search criteria from a remote server while the server evaluating the request remains provably oblivious to the search criteria. In this extended abstract, we give a high level outline of a new scheme for this problem and an experimental analysis of its scalability. The new scheme is highly efficient in practice. We demonstrate the practical applicability of the scheme by considering its performance in the demanding scenario of providing a privacy preserving version of the Google News Alerts service.