Exploiting Social Tagging Profiles to Personalize Web Search

In this paper, we investigate the exploitation of user profiles defined in social tagging services to personalize Web search. One of the key challenges of a personalization framework is the elicitation of user profiles able to represent user interests. We propose a personalization approach that exploits the tagging information of users within a social tagging service as a way of obtaining their interests. We evaluate this approach in Delicious, a social Web bookmarking service, and apply our personalization approach to a Web search system. Our evaluation results indicate a clear improvement of our approach over related state of the art personalization approaches.