Personalization and Privacy in Information Retrieval

An information retrieval process is used to deal with the problem of information overload due to the complex and huge volume of documents (html page, sound track, video) available online. Since I have primarily been working on adaptive personalization system, I have never doubted the need of such a system to help user obtain their information wanted efficiently and effectively, however there are some questions always in my mind, as the same with dimensions of the IR success, which are the novelty and diversity of Information Retrieval. AIS (adaptive information system) aims to provide the user items that personalized to him by studying the user profile and recommending similar items user. This might lead to a problem that users are always getting same stream of documents if the system works perfectly with the scarification of diversity, or even novelty, because he can never have something 'new'. This has occurred to google search when Google implemented personalized search. One would be that when I type weather in the searchbox, the weather pittsburgh was automatically prompted out. Interesting, but might not be the case all the time.

Another problem with information retrieval is the Privacy issue. As I have also worked on the research of social networks and online communities, I found increasing number of people have started to take privacy issue into consideration when interacting with online activities. One contradiction from my perspective is obviously the example of Google another. For the same account holder, gmail, in this case, google is recording every search query you made and keeping them in their database. I do not worry too much about it because I am a less sensitive person with fewer things to hide around, But some one does, and we should do more about it.