Thursday, April 15, 2004

A9's "personalized search"

A9's new search does allow you to view your search history and previously viewed search results. But it is not personalized. Personalized search means that the search results differ depending on who you are.

A9's search could be personalized using this history data. For example, if Google used search history instead of an explicitly specified profile for their personalized search, they would have a search engine that personalizes based on your history. Of course, it's not quite as simple as that. Since Google's personalization search technology relies on a coarse-grained technique, the quality of the personalized results would remain low. It'll be interesting to see if A9 can find a better approach.

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