Recently, Google introduced more personalization technology at their website, which I will review later. But back to September 2001, Google had already acquired the outride, a startup of doing personalized search. Outride is a spinoff of Xerox PARC (Just recently, Xerox PARC has a deal with the search engine startup Powerset to do natural language search). Outride was founded by Jim Pitkow, Hinrich Schutze, and Todd Cass. It is one of earliest systems doing personalized search. The most relevant publication about Outride is an article of Communication of ACM. From the article, I can see that outride is also doing personalization at the client side and uses query augmentation and result reranking techniques. It looks that they implemented a plug-in of web browser (sidebar), like toolbar. From the paper, there are not many technical details revealed.
UCAIR emphasizes the eager feedback, i.e., when the user has the interaction with the retrieval system such as selecting a web page, the system can make some responses, e.g. updating the user model. UCAIR is based on the decision-theoretic framework and context-sensitive statistical language model.
