Issues in Personalizing Information Retrieval

This paper shortly discusses the main issues related to the problem of personalizing search. To overcome the “one size fits all” behavior of most search engines and Information Retrieval Systems, in recent years a great deal of research has addressed the problem of defining techniques aimed at tailoring the search outcome to the user context. This paper outlines the main issues related to the two basic problems beyond these approaches: context representation and definition of processes which exploit the context knowledge to improve the quality of the search outcome. Moreover some other important and related issues are mentioned, such as privacy, and evaluation.