Providing useful and private Web search by means of social network profiling

Web search engines (WSEs) build user profiles and use them to offer an enhanced web search experience. Nevertheless, these elements might contain sensitive data that may represent a privacy threat for the users. There are some works in the literature that address this situation while preserving the profile usefulness. These schemes submit synthetic queries that are fake but related to the real general interests of the user. Specifically, they rely on past user queries to obtain the legitimate interests of each user. We argue that this is not always the best strategy and, in this paper, we study the use of social networks to gather this information and provide a better personalized service while offering an equivalent privacy level.