Search Engines Personalization

1. Search Engines Personalization Taly Sharon and Ariel Frank

2. Google and Yahoo Control the Market! • Share of Searches December 2004 T. Sharon & A. Frank

3. Problem: Search is not Sticky! • Google is offering Gmail. • Yahoo has acquired Stata Labs (startup) • Bloomba e-mail. • SAproxy spam-blocking technology. • A new (old) front: Personalization T. Sharon & A. Frank

4. What in the Presentation? • What is personalization? • Areas for personalization • Who personalizes? • Personalization challenges T. Sharon & A. Frank

5. What is Personalization? • WordNet Dictionary • Adj.1.personalised–made for or directed or adjusted to a particular individual;"personalizedluggage"; "personalizedadvice" Synonyms:individualised, individualized, personalized • Related Wordsindividualised, individualized, personal, personalized T. Sharon & A. Frank

6. Web Pages Personalization • On a Web site, personalization is the process of tailoring pages to individual users' characteristics or preferences. • Involves customizing some feature of a product or service so that the customer enjoys more convenience, lower cost, or some other benefit. http://searchsap.techtarget.com/gDefinition/0,294236,sid21_gci532341,00.html www.personalization.org T. Sharon & A. Frank

7. A More Practical Definition • Personalization is a combination of customization which includes: • explicit preferences and an implied storage for every user, and • contextualization, where an application knows about a task and offers a task-specific meaning or infers from user behavior what the user is trying to do. http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-45-20040803YahooTalksPersonalizedSearch.html T. Sharon & A. Frank

8. Types of Personalization 0. Preferences (set results number to max:-) • My/Personalized homepage • Local/Geographic search • User Interface/Visualization • Personalize/Settings • Downloading/Localization • Explorer Buttons • Toolbars • Desktop/Personal • Alerts • Memory/History –“save search” or “save results” T. Sharon & A. Frank

9. 1. MyMyYahoo: What Will Yours Do? T. Sharon & A. Frank

10. MyMSN T. Sharon & A. Frank

11. Google Personalized Homepage T. Sharon & A. Frank

12. So what was the message ? T. Sharon & A. Frank

13. 2. Local/Geographic Search • Google Local/Maps (also ca,uk, mobile) • Yahoo Maps did it a long time ago… • A9 does it differently T. Sharon & A. Frank

14. Google Local T. Sharon & A. Frank

15. Google Local Search Result T. Sharon & A. Frank

16. Google – Satellite T. Sharon & A. Frank

17. 3. User Interface/Visualization • A few examples • MSN Search Builder • Clusters/Grouping/Maps • Vivisimo/Clusty • Mooter/CartOO/WebBrain • A9 Display T. Sharon & A. Frank

18. MSN Search Builder T. Sharon & A. Frank

19. MSN בונה שאילתות גם בעברית T. Sharon & A. Frank

20. Clusty T. Sharon & A. Frank

21. KartOO T. Sharon & A. Frank

22. A9 T. Sharon & A. Frank

23. 4. Personalized Search • Google Personalized T. Sharon & A. Frank

24. Google Personalized setup T. Sharon & A. Frank

25. Google Personalized Search T. Sharon & A. Frank

26. Google Personalized Search T. Sharon & A. Frank

27. Theory vs. Practice?! T. Sharon & A. Frank

28. Yahoo Personals? Oops… T. Sharon & A. Frank

29. 5. Downloading/Localization • Explorer Buttons • Toolbars • Desktop/Personal • Alerts Want Toolbars? T. Sharon & A. Frank

30. Desktop Search • Searches PC desktop • Integrate results in SE searches • Timeline – warm battle during the fall….: • October 2004: Google Desktop released • December 2004: MSN toolbar suite • December 2004: Ask Jeeves desktop search • January 2005: Yahoo desktop search • May 2005: MSN Toolbar+Desktop T. Sharon & A. Frank

31. 6. Memory/History/Save Search • A9 • MyAskJeeves • MySearch.Yahoo Sticky The New Silver Bullet? T. Sharon & A. Frank

32. A9 (top) T. Sharon & A. Frank

33. A9 (bottom) T. Sharon & A. Frank

34. MyJeeves http://sp.ask.com/docs/mj/tour4.html T. Sharon & A. Frank

35. MySearch.Yahoo T. Sharon & A. Frank

36. Google Search History T. Sharon & A. Frank

37. What’s Next? T. Sharon & A. Frank

38. Human Search Engine? T. Sharon & A. Frank

39. Google Answers T. Sharon & A. Frank

40. AskYahoo! T. Sharon & A. Frank

41. Also in Israel - AskZeev T. Sharon & A. Frank

42. Wondir, Answers.com (and Ask/Brainboost) • An attempt to give an answer to a question and not documents for a query. T. Sharon & A. Frank

43. Answers.com T. Sharon & A. Frank

44. Who Personalizes (all?) • Amazon/A9 – history, presentation, local • Google – local/map, Desktop, Personalized, Personalized-Homepage, GoogleAlert, History. • Yahoo – local/map, myYahoo, mySearch • AskJeeves – Saved Searches • MSN – Toolbar+Desktop, presentation, question answering * All have Toolbars T. Sharon & A. Frank

45. Challenges • Search is temporal. • Just because people search for something doesn't mean they are truly interested in it. • For example, if you're sick and search for information on a particular medicine, that doesn't mean you are always going to be interested in finding information on that medicine. • Multiple users share a computer? • A user performs a search for a friend? • requires user effort to be successful. • Privacy Issues. T. Sharon & A. Frank

46. Questions? www.sharon-it.com T. Sharon & A. Frank