A Framework for Protecting Privacy of Users in Personalized Web Search

The world has become a small village due to the invent of Internet and related technologies. People of all walks of life started using Internet services for communication and exchange of information. Search engines became very popular as they can provide requiredinformation to people of all fields. Especially Google is used widely as search engine. Other search engines like Yahoo are also used similarly. The problem with search engines is that they support personalized web search to keep track of users’ actions with respect to search key words and the results provided. However, they do lack in security to protect the privacy of online users. This is the main cause of concern. Not only personalized web search but also privacy to the identity of users is very important. Privacy is nothing but nondisclosure of identifies of users who perform search operations on different sensitive topics as well. In this paper we proposed a framework and an algorithm to ensure that the privacy of the users is not lost. We also built a prototype application that demonstrates the proof of concept. The empirical results are encouraging.