Towards a collaborative ranking mechanism for efficient and personalized internet search service provisioning

Abstract

The aim of this paper is, in accordance with efficient web search service operation objectives, to propose enhancements to the sophistication of the functionality that can be offered by search engine services. A meta-search third-party result ranking mechanism is proposed, which is capable of adapting over the continuous changes that occur on the web, providing in parallel personalized information acquisition considering the user's navigation behaviour. Transparency is achieved for both personalization and web evolution adaptation mechanisms, requiring virtually none effort from the user's part. In essence, the proposed meta search engine rates, re-organises and combines the results acquired from search services for a specific user information resource request in accordance with a weighted combination of a performance related factor (tightly related to the ranking of the web result as given by the search engine service) and a reliability related factor (corresponding to the user satisfaction stemming from the specific web result that he/she browses), while the performance of each search engine with respect to adequately adapting to the web evolution is taken into account. For the evaluation of the web results reliability, a collaborative reputation mechanism is utilized, which helps estimating their quality and predicting their future usability, taking into account their past performance in consistently satisfying user expectations. A set of results indicative of the efficiency of our proposed scheme is provided. The Internet search services used were Google, MSN and Yahoo!. © 2011 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.