Personalized Search

From the blog of Venture Beat, I got to know there is another startup doing personalized search Collarity.  There are already quite a few startups doing personalized search such as Surf Canyon. 

I tried this version after registering an account. There is a slider called relevance compass, which can let individual users continuously tune the search results from the extremely personalized level through community level to totally population level. This implementation is same as what Microsoft Researcher Susan Dumais did for personalized search with the former intern Jaime Teevan.  After trying some queries and clicking some results, I could how my search results got personalized. Maybe it is still in the early stage of the company. There are some different suggested terms appearing at the bottom of the compass when users move the slider. But the speed is slow and the suggested term is needed to be selected by user for the addition into the query. Here is a paragraph from Venture Beat about the Collarity.

“Levy Cohen, chief executive of Palo Alto-based Collarity, said he got his idea to launch Collarity because it bothered him that Google returns the exact same results to people even if they have different interests. If you’ve searched for information on Linux before, then the search engine should return results relevant to open source, he said. Moreover, if you search for “Java,” the search engine should know whether you’re more likely interested in the computer language, or coffee.”

-Venture Beat

Collarity claims to use the search result of people “like you” to personalize the search results. However, I can only imagine that using other similar users’ interest, we can at most get the community/group level personalization. If we really want the personal level personalization, we should use the user’s own user profile. The idea of Collarity is the collaborative filtering idea, which is extensively used in recommendation systems such as those at Amazon.com and Netflix. But most personalization research in academia is focused on exploiting the user’s own profile. On the other hand, we may combine these two ideas (i.e., item-based and user-based).

One comment mentions that the Collarity is similar with a demo of Yahoo! Research, i.e. Mindset. I find that the interface of Mindset also uses the slider to vary the results from shopping to research.