Personalization and privacy in profile-based web search

Personalized Web Search is a method of searching to improve the quality and accuracy of web search. It has gained much attention recently. The main goal of personalized web search is to customize search results that are more relevant and tailored to the user interests. But, effective personalization needs collecting and aggregating user information that can be private or general. The unwillingness to disclose some private information by the users to search engines affects the efficiency of the personalized web search system. This paper contains a survey on privacy protection in personalized web search that model user preferences as user profiles. Also a personalized web search framework is discussed in this paper, which adaptively generalizes profiles while considering user specified privacy requirements.