Trust-enhanced peer-to-peer collaborative web search

Abstract

We spend a lot of our time online using web search services, but even the leading search engines frequently fail to deliver relevant results for the vague queries that are commonplace among today’s web searchers. Interestingly, when we look at the search patterns of link-minded searchers (perhaps friends or colleagues) we do find considerable overlap between their queries and result-selections. This motivates a more collaborative approach to web search, one in which the past search experiences of friends and colleagues can be used to usefully influence our new searches. In this talk we will describe how a novel combination of casebased reasoning, web search, and peer-to-peer networking can be used to develop a platform for personalized web search, which benefits from better quality results, improved robustness against search spam, while offering an increased level of privacy to the individual user.