Pagerank. Directed Edge - Home. ACM Recommender Systems 2009 -- Home. Scaling Personalized Web Search. Personalized Search Primer - And Google's Approach. Guest article by Greg Linden, founder of personalized news service Findory and author of Geeking with Greg. Google has received much attention, not all of it positive, for its efforts to personalize search. In this article, I will briefly describe personalized search, why Google and other search engines are trying to do personalized search, the approach Google is taking toward personalized search, and other approaches to personalized search.
What is personalized search? Personalized search is showing different search results to different people. Personalized search uses each searcher's past behavior to try to understand intent and what is relevant to that searcher. If I search for [java] and you search for [java], and we see different results because of what we did in the past, that is personalized search. It is true that a search for [java] is ambiguous. Your past behavior may help the search engine figure out what you want. Why do personalized search? Google Personalized Search Conclusion.