There are two patent applications related with the search engine personalization.
One is from Google, Variable personalization of search results in a search engine,which was demonstrated somewhere on the Google website before, although it had disappeared. The basic idea is to have a slider button for the user to tune the degree of personalization. Here is the abstract of the patent application.
This invention would enable a searcher to fill out a profile, perform a normal search, and then use a slider button to indicate how much his or her personal information from the profile should be used to modify (rerank) that search based upon the personalization information that they have entered into the profile, by sliding the button partially, or all the way to a full influence on the results.
The other is from Yahoo! Color Graphing and Personalization. Here is the abstract of the patent application.
In a search processing system, identifying input authority weights for a plurality of pages, wherein an input authority weight represents a user’s weight of a page in terms of interest; distributing a page’s input authority weight over one or more pages that are linked in a graph to the page; and using a resulting authority weight for a page in effecting a search result list. The search result list might comprise one or more of reordering search hits and highlighting search hits.
