Privacy Protection and Personalized

Profiles in Web Search Engines

Assignment 5 for Advanced Applications of the Web and Internet, Dr. Jim Jansen

AlHasan AlSammarraie
College of Computer Science and Engineering
Hamad Bin Khalifa University
Doha, State of Qatar
aalsammarraie@hbku.edu.qa

Introduction
In this Assignment, I have introduced Google Custom Search and did an extensive research
about privacy protection and personalized profiles in Web Search Engines.

Installing Google Custom Search in my consultancy services e-commerce website showed how
Google made it simple to integrate state of the art search capabilities built by Google in any
website. Google monetizes that by having ads within the search box results or by charging
certain amount regularly.

In regards to Web Search Engines research topics, as such search engines specially Google
have become an essential part of today’s lifestyle, there are tremendous number of topics that is
related and is an area of research. Having this said, Privacy has been always an attractive topic
when web technologies are in discussion as people started realizing that their privacy is being
compromised in all aspects by having technology adopted everywhere and almost for
everything.

Privacy in Web Search Engines as a topic also have different aspects one of which is its relation
with personalized profiles of users of Web Search Engines that is our topic in this research
paper.

Background
Most of the search engines nowadays uses personalized profiling in order to optimize search
results and also to contribute to its advertising services among other services that the search
engine utilizes to make money. As search by it self is a free service, Web Search Engines
utilizes other services to make money one of which advertising and specifically targeted
advertising.

Collecting user information and search engine queries contribute heavily to the personalized
experience user gets in addition to the success of provides advertisement engines.
Having this said, linking search engine queries with a specific person reveals a lot of information
about the person that is considered private and raise privacy concerns [1].

Personalized profiles and its privacy issues is not the only privacy topic related to Web Search
Engines. Another privacy issue for example is the ability to search for a person and interrelate
his data that is spread over multiple locations on the web and in different time spans by certain
identifiers such as email address, name, mobile number or physical addresses and nicknames
[2].

Web Search Engines and Personalized Profiling

Personalized profiling is considered as a great tool introduced in the Web search industry to
optimize results in addition to contributing to other services such as advertising.
The following is a simple diagram that demonstrates how personalized web search works in in
its simplest form [3].

To explain the model, the following is a list that described the process.

1. A user sends a web search query (q) and a tool that is called profiler which builds the
profile receives the query and sends it to the User Profile as an input to the process of
building and optimizing the profile.
2. The profile also sends information to the profiler (g) to be added to the query that is sent
to the servers that conducts the actual search (q+g).
3. Server sends a response (r) to the profiler which again sends it to the user profile and
filter it based on Users profile before sending it to the User (r’) [3].

This process shows the direct impact of personalized profiles on user search results.
Web search engines wear able to do users profiling based on parsing and saving important data
which they get from communication packets, network protocols and other technologies such as
the following

1. IP addresses
 2. Location Services
3. Correlating Search Queries Content
4. Temporary and Persistent Cookies
5. Users’ Login

Among all of the methods Users Authentication is considered and most accurate and effective
as it clearly identifies the person. Although Google among other Web Search Engines do not
ask users to authenticate before Search Queries but Google provide a number of other services
which shares the same Login system with Search. This means in today’s Google services
spectrum, if a user is logged in to Youtube, Gmail, Chrome or even Gsuite for businesses
cookies will keep the user logged in and consequently register his search queries later [4].

This has raised a lot of concerns about privacy and multiple researchers and technologies are
addressing this concern.

One approach that multiple search engines have adopted and was proposed in literature is
demonstrated by the following diagram.

This approach has acted to the privacy concerns in multiple ways that are
- Introducing Privacy Preference as an essential and adjacent component to the profile.
- Privacy Preference acts in many directions including
- Limiting what can be stored in the profile
- Limiting what can be added to the query and sent to the web (g)
- Having a component that acts in optimizing results on the client side rather than
sending it as an information along with the query [5].

Conclusion
In conclusion, privacy has become very important topic as it is a concern of all people using
technology and care about their privacy. Web Search Engines is in the center of discussions in
regards to privacy as Search Queries is a major source of information for Companies behind
Search Engines not only for optimizing search results but also for Revenue generation
technologies and services such as the following,

- Search Results Advertisements

- Web integrated advertisements such as AdSense of Google
- Market Research and Information Reports

Users are also in a conflict as some do worry about their privacy and information but also do
benefit of the optimization and relevant results they got in terms of Search Queries and relevant
targeted advertisement.

A quick win strategy for users is to understand privacy terms of their main service providers
such as Google and also learn and configure privacy configurations available by the provider.

References
[1] Bodogh Z., (2011), 'Privacy Issues Of The Internet Search Engines - In The Light Of EU Data
Protection Legislation', Masaryk University Journal of Law and Technology, Vol.5:2

[2] Spink, A. and Jansen, B J. (2004). 'Searching for people on web search engines', Journal o f
Documentation, vol,60, no.3, pp.266-278.

[3] Lidan Shou, He Bai, Ke Chen, and Gang Chen, "Supporting Privacy Protection in
PersonalizedWeb Search", IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, vol.26,
no.2, February 2014.

[4] Panjwani, Saurabh, Shrivastava, Nisheeth, Shukla, Saurabh, Jaiswal, Sharad. (2013).
Understanding the privacy-personalization dilemma for web search: a user perspective.

[5] Y. Xu, K. Wang, B. Zhang, and Z. Chen," Privacy-enhancing personalized web search."
Proc.16th Int'l Conf. World Wide Web (WWW), pp.591-600, 2007.