Measuring Web Search Personalization

Personalization in online services is the practice of tailoringdata contents for customers according to what is supposedto be their expectation. By design, personalization has beenconsidered an important tool to help users to find the mostinteresting relevant data. By doing that, personalization alsofilters the web contents and potentially narrows the view ofusers. In this context, our work aims to measure personalizationlevels of web search results.First, we study personalization for web search engines withtwo case studies about Google Search. The results show a remarkablelevel of Google personalized search results basedon sets of keywords, and we show that a specific website appearsas prevalent in the results of web searches.Second, we measure the personalization degrees of an onlinenews aggregator to provide a wider view of the problems. Italso shows that compelling evidence such as “suggested foryou" heavily depends on past users’ activities.Finally, we study personalization of search results on an onlineshopping platformby measuring price steering phenomenon.Particularly, we investigate the impacts of online behaviours,locations and economic performance factors, and we observethat price steering is based on user’s behaviours but it is alsoinfluenced by the geographic location of users.