Paper Info
Title
Anonymous Search Histories Featuring Personalized Advertisement-Balancing Privacy with Economic Interests
Abstract
Search engines are key to finding information on the web. Search presently is free for users financed by targeted advertisement. Today, the current search terms determine the ad placement. In the near future, search-engine providers will make use of detailed user profiles for better ad placement. This puts user privacy at risk. Anonymizing search histories, which is a solution in principle, gives way to a trade-off between privacy and the usability of the data for ad placement. This paper studies this tradeoff systematically. To this end, we implement an algorithm for the anonymization of search histories which is flexible regarding the target function. It can retain frequent terms or terms where corresponding ads are clicked with a high probability, keep up the number of users it can derive interests for, etc. We quantify the usefulness of the anonymized log for ad placement in a broad way, e.g., by estimating the number of ad clicks or of ad impressions, based on marketing data from Yahoo! As a result, anonymized search logs are still useful for ad placement, but this very much depends on the target function.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2011
Transactions on Data Privacy
economic interests,anonymized search log,target function,anonymous search histories featuring,personalized advertisement-balancing privacy,search engine,anonymizing search history,corresponding ad,ad impression,ad placement,ad click,better ad placement,current search term
Field
DocType
Volume
Data mining,Internet privacy,World Wide Web,Search engine,Advertising,Computer science,Usability,Market data,User privacy
Journal
4
Issue
Citations 
PageRank 
1
3
0.40
References 
Authors
16
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Thorben Burghardt1496.51
Klemens Böhm21549323.08
Achim Guttmann350.79
Chris Clifton43327544.44