The compass filter: Search engine result personalization using Web communities

We propose a simple approach to search engine personalization based on Web communities [14]. User information -in particular, the Web communities whose neighborhoods the user has selected in the past- is used to change the order of the returned search results. We present experimental evidence suggesting that our method indeed improves the quality of the ranking. Our experiments were carried out on a search engine created by our research group and focusing on the Greek fragment of the worldwide Web (1.33 million documents); we also discuss the issue of scaling.