Personalizing your Web searches

In today's San Jose Merc, Michael Bazeley has a front-page story about the newest frontier in search engine technology: personalization. Modern search engines do a lot of things well, but they can't read minds. When someone types in the keyword "jaguar," most search tools can't tell whether the user wants information about the animal or the British sports car. That may be about to change. Excerpt:

Pitkow developed technology to do this a few years ago at Outride, a company he co-founded. A spin-off from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Outride created a tool bar that sits to the side of a browser window. The ``sidebar'' holds a user's bookmarks, search history (up to 1,000 mouse clicks) and other information. It uses that information to build profiles that change as the user navigates the Internet.

Tests showed that Outride users could find what they were looking for twice as quickly. ...

Other companies have used the same approach. Eurekster, a New Zealand firm, launched a Web site in January (www.eurekster.com) that demonstrates how users can train a search engine. The search site monitors Web pages users visit and how long they stay there, then ranks them higher in subsequent searches.