Proxy-Terms Based Query Obfuscation Technique for Private Web Search

Search engines store users’ queries in a query log for performing personalized information retrieval. However, query logs cause privacy concerns and reveal a lot of information about individuals if used against them. Private web search (PWS) provides a privacy-preserving information retrieval (IR) facility which allows users to retrieve information from an IR system without revealing true search queries. Current PWS techniques that are explored in the domain of web search are query obfuscation-based private web search (OB-PWS). These techniques achieve web privacy by injecting cover queries into the user profiles. However, existing OB-PWS techniques submit true queries along with cover queries and achieve query obfuscation in an isolated manner without considering the similarity between consecutive queries. In this article, we propose a proxy-terms based query obfuscation technique that allows users to retrieve information from an IR system through proxy queries without submitting true queries. IR system automatically generates cover queries and true queries from the proxy queries and cannot differentiate whether the user is trying to retrieve information for the cover queries or true query. We analyzed the effectiveness of the proposed technique on test queries, and develop a similarity metric for testing the accuracy of the proposed technique. Promising results of experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed technique.