Personalized Web Search
Erdal Tuleu
email: etuleu@fit.edu
Faculty sponsor:
Dr. Philip Chan
email: pkc@cs.fit.edu
Project goals:
- improve the relevance of search results by re-ranking them based on a learned user profile;
- experiment with short-term user profiles;
- be more relevant than Google.
Motivation:
Search engines, by default, do not take into consideration user's interests or search history, and therefore may not return relevant results. For example a query of "apple" can mean totally different things to a programmer than to a normal web surfer. By taking advantage of user's bookmarks, visited sites, search or click history, search engines can be more useful and thus provide a better user experience.
Features:
There are three main parts that we will focus on:
- the user behavior
- the behavior can be observed in many ways: search history, click history, time spent on a page considering its length, mouse movement and scrolling information on a page, digged sites, bookmarks, geographical location and others;
- using machine learning techniques we aim to obtain a user profile
- the user profile will need to be adaptive, so that when new behavior is observed, the user profile will be updated; therefore the machine learning part will need to use new input as it is made available;
- the actual user profile that will be mixed in with the objective search results from Google in order to obtain a new ranking that is more relevant and useful to the user
Milestones:
Milestone 1 (September 29):
- read relevant papers and past work;
- get familiar with the available data and software used.
Milestone 2 (October 27):
- discuss ideas for building a short-term user profile;
- design a way to collect user behavior data;
- develop an algorithm for building the profile;
- implement as much as possible of the algorithm
Milestone 3 (November 24):
- finish the implementation of the algorithm
- evaluate performance using existing scoring function
"I have discussed with the team and approve this project plan. I will evaluate the progress and assign a grade for each of the three milestones."
Signature: _______________________________ Date: ________