Personalizing Web Search using Long Term Browsing History

Nicolaas Matthijs Filip Radlinski University of Cambridge Microsoft 15 JJ Thomson Avenue 840 Cambie Street Cambridge, UK Vancouver, BC, Canada [email protected] fi[email protected]

ABSTRACT Personalizing web search has received a lot of attention Personalizing web search results has long been recognized by the research community (e.g. [1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, 15, as an avenue to greatly improve the search experience. We 16, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 28]). We improve upon this work in present a personalization approach that builds a user in- two key ways: First, we build an improved user profile for terest profile using users’ complete browsing behavior, then personalizing web search results. Second, we improve upon uses this model to rerank web results. We show that us- the evaluation methodology, by performing the first large ing a combination of content and previously visited websites online comparative evaluation of personalization strategies. provides effective personalization. We extend previous work To successfully personalize search results, it is essential to by proposing a number of techniques for filtering previously be able to identify what types of results are relevant to users. viewed content that greatly improve the user model used for Two alternatives are: (1) ask users to label documents as personalization. Our approaches are compared to previous more personally relevant or not, and (2) infer personal rele- work in offline experiments and are evaluated against un- vance automatically. As the former approach requires extra personalized web search in large scale online tests. Large effort from users, we opt for the latter. In particular, the improvements are found in both cases. content of all the web pages visited by users, along with the users’ particular behavior on web search results, is used to build a user model. This data was collected using a Fire- Categories and Subject Descriptors fox add-on created for this purpose. The profile constructed H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information is then used to rerank the top search results returned by a Search and Retrieval non-personalized web search engine. The key difference from previous work in the profiles we construct is that we parse General Terms: Algorithms, Experimentation web page structure, using term extraction and part of speech tagging to extract noun phrases to refine the user model. We Keywords: AlterEgo, Browsing History, Evaluation, Per- show that this yields significant retrieval improvements over sonalized Web Search, Interleaving, Ranking, User Profile web search and other personalization methods, without re- quiring any effort on the user’s part, and without changing 1. INTRODUCTION the user’s search environment. Although web search has become an essential part of our Second, most previous work on search personalization has lives, there is still room for improvement. In particular, a involved an evaluation using either (1) a small number of major deficiency of current retrieval systems is that they are users evaluating the relevance of documents for a small set not adaptive enough to users’ individual needs and interests of search queries not representative of a real workload, (2) (e.g. [27]). This can be illustrated with the search query the TREC query and document collection, and simulating a “ajax”. This query will return results about Ajax based web personalized search setting, or (3) an after-the-fact log based development, about the Dutch football team Ajax Amster- analysis. Improvements found using these methods do not dam, and websites about the cleaning product Ajax. Clearly, necessarily translate to actual improvements in user search different users would prefer different results. Additionally, experience on a real query workload. In this work, we start previous research has noted that the vast majority of search by using document judgments obtained from a small num- queries are short [22, 9] and ambiguous [4, 19]. Often, differ- ber of users for 72 queries to assess potential approaches. ent users consider the same query to mean different things We then select three methods for complete online evalua- [27, 9, 16, 20, 32]. Personalized search is a potential solution tion, with our personalized search system being used by 41 to all these problems. users for two months to issue thousands of queries as part of their day to day web search activities. We use an interleav- ing evaluation approach, that has been shown to accurately Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for reflect differences in ranking relevance [17, 18]. personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are After reviewing related work next, we give an overview not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies of the user profile generation and re-ranking strategies in- bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to vestigated in Section 3. We then describe our evaluation republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. approach in detail, with results from our offline evaluation WSDM’11, February 9–12, 2011, Hong Kong, China. in Section 5, and online evaluation in Section 6. Copyright 2011 ACM 978-1-4503-0493-1/11/02 ...$10.00. 2. RELATED WORK indexes files on the user’s hard drive, e-mails, visited web Previous work on search personalization is typically char- pages and so on. However, this approach treats web docu- acterized by the data source used to learn about the user on ments as common documents and does not take advantage one hand, and the way in which a user is modeled on the of the characteristics and structure encapsulated within a other hand. web page. In this paper, we focus just on web documents, using users’ complete browsing history. We also exploit the Observed User Interactions specific characteristics and structure of web pages, showing A number of personalization approaches using previous user this yields substantial improvements. Additionally, consider interactions with the search engine to describe the users have a variety of different weighting schemes to improve retrieval been proposed. This has the benefit that such usage data is quality. easily collected by search engines. Finally, some previous research suggests that such profile Aiming for short-term personalization, Sriram et al. [24] based personalization may lack effectiveness on unambigu- describe a search engine that personalized based on the cur- ous queries such as “london weather forecast”, and therefore rent user session. Although this approach is shown to im- no personalization should be attempted in these cases [29]. prove retrieval quality, session data is often too sparse to However, if this or a related query has been issued by this personalize ideally, and does not allow personalization be- user before, we could detect any preference for particular fore the second query in each session. Similarly, [6] propose weather forecast websites by using the user’s URL history using such session-level personalization. as suggested by the PClick approach [7]. Hence, we find that A longer term personalization click model can also be a combination of user representations is important. used, exploting clickthrough data collected over a long time Commercial Personalization Systems period. For example, Speretta and Gauch [23] and Qiu and Cho [16] model users by classifying previously visited web Recently, personalized search has also been made available pages into a topic hierarchy, using this model to rerank fu- in some mainstream web search engines including Google1 ture search results. Similarly, Joachims [11] proposes using and Yahoo!. These appear to use a combination of explicitly user click-through data as training data to learn a general and implicitly collected information about the user. Many search retrieval function, which can then be used to produce more companies are engaging in personalization both for personalized rankings for individual users or groups of users. search (e.g. surfcanyon.com) and for advertising based on Other related approaches include [20, 25, 26]. user behavior. However, as the details of these approaches Also, a particularly straightforward yet effective search are not publicly available and because it is hard to program- interaction personalization approach is PClick, proposed by matically get access to these personalized rankings, we only Dou et al. [7]. This method involves promoting URLs pre- compare our approach to the default search engine ranking viously clicked on by the same user for the same query. We and not the personalized version. will compare our approach to PClick, and also extend it to all previously visited web pages similarly to [28]. 3. PERSONALIZATION STRATEGIES In only using search interaction data, and often limited within the same search session, the methods described above In this section, we describe our approach. The first step suffer from data sparsity. As such, they often must re-rank consists of constructing a user profile, that is then used in a results with only a limited amount of data about the user. second phase to re-rank search results. Other methods have attempted to incorporate more infor- mation about the user by using the full browsing history 3.1 User Profile Generation (e.g. Sugiyama et al [25]). A user is represented by a list of terms and weights associ- The most promising profile based approach was proposed ated with those terms, a list of visited URLs and the number by Teevan et al. [28]. They use a rich model of user interests, of visits to each, and a list of past search queries and pages built from search-related information, previously visited web clicked for these search queries. This profile is generated as pages, and other information about the user including docu- shown in Figure 1. First, a user’s browsing history is col- ments on their hard drive, e-mails, and so forth. They then lected and stored as (URL, HTML content) pairs. Next, this use this data to re-rank the top returned web search results, browsing history is processed into six different summaries by giving more weight to terms deemed more personally rel- consisting of term lists. Finally, the term weights are gen- evant. In doing this, they obtain a significant improvement erated using three different weighting algorithms. We now over default web ranking. We will compare our method to describe each of these steps in detail. this term reweighting approach. 3.1.1 Data Capture Representing the User To obtain user browsing histories, a Firefox add-on called Irrespective of the source of data about users, a model must AlterEgo was developed. To respect the users’ privacy as encode this data. A variety of such models have been used much as possible, a random unique identifier is generated at in the past. These include using a vector of weighted terms installation time. This identifier is used for all data exchange 2 (e.g. [5, 28]), a set of concepts (e.g. [14]), an instance of a between the add-on and the server recording the data . predefined ontology (e.g. [8, 15, 21]) or a hierarchical cate- 1 gory tree based on ODP and corresponding keywords (e.g. [2, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized- search-for-everyone.html 13]). In this paper, we will focus on modeling users through 2Note that it is necessary to collect this data server-side a vector of weighted terms. for research purposes, but our approach does not require In particular, Teevan et al. [28] make use a rich keyword- the data to be centralized. Our entire method can execute based representation of users, utilizing a desktop index which client-side, avoiding the privacy concerns that arise with Title Unigrams User Profile Terms Metadata description WordNet Dictionary and Weights Unigrams Filtering TF Weighting Browsing Browsing Visited URLs + HistoryBrowsing Full text Unigrams HistoryBrowsing User Profile number of visits History User Profile Google N-Gram TFxIDF Weighting History Terms Metadata keywords Terms Filtering Previous searches & Extracted Terms BM25 Weighting click-through data

Noun phrases No Filtering

Figure 1: User Profile Generation Steps and Workflow

Table 1: Captured Data Statistics Table 2: Extracted terms from the AlterEgo website Metric Total Min Max Mean and the Wikipedia page about Mallorca Page Visits 530,334 51 53,459 10,607 AlterEgo Mallorca Unique Page Visits 218,228 36 26,756 4,365 add-ons majorca Google Searches 39,838 0 4,203 797 Nicolaas palma Bing Searches 186 0 53 4 Matthijs island Yahoo Searches 87 0 29 2 CSTIT spanish Wikipedia Pages 1,728 0 235 35 Nicolaas Matthijs balearic Language Processing cathedral Cambridge Palma de Mallorca Every time a user leaves a non-secure (non-https) web keyword extraction port page, the add-on transmits the user’s unique identifier, the page URL, the visit duration, the current date and time, and the length of the source HTML to the server. The server Title Unigrams then attempts to fetch the source HTML of this page. This The words inside any