I talked with a researcher about the personalized information management in the healthcare domain Contextual search is considered as a promising way to improve the information seeking of practitioners in a specific domain. It is interesting to see that vertical personalized search or personalized search in a specific domain has been given a lot of attention. For example, Healia is a startup to provide personalized health information retrieval service in the health domain.
So far, I have known two domains which are interested in the personalized search, law and healthcare. For both of these domains, people have to look for the needle in the haystack and people really care to find relevant information even by interacting with the retrieval system for many iterations for a single information need, which provide the opportunities for the personalized search algorithm to get enough information about the user intention.
However, I also show the concerns about the feasibility of the application of personalized search in these domains. For example, I met a researcher in the law information system company, who complained that lawyers did not want to try the personalized search prototypes because of the privacy concern. Thus I also wonder what the opinion of the doctors about the personalized search is. Thus in order to apply personalized search in a specific domain, we may need to do some survey to investigate whether the people in this domain really like and accept the idea or not.
But I will think vertical personalized search will become more popular in the future, not restricted to healthcare or law domain.
