Persistence in the ephemeral: utilizing repeat behaviors for multi-session personalized search

As the abundance of information on the Internet grows, an increasing burden is placed on the user to specify his or her query precisely in order to avoid extraneous results that may be relevant, but not useful. At the same time, users have a tendency to repeat their search behaviors, seeking the same URL (re-finding) as well as issuing the same query (re-searching). These repeated actions reveal a form of user preference that the search engine can utilize to personalize the results. In our approach, we personalize search results related to ongoing tasks, allowing for a different degree of strength of interest, and diversity of interest per task. We focus on high valued queries; queries that are both related to past queries and will be related to future queries given the ongoing nature of the task.