Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Databases and Information Systems Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

2010

Search engines

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Databases and Information Systems

Embellishing Text Search Queries To Protect User Privacy, Hwee Hwa Pang, Xuhua Ding, Xiaokui Xiao Sep 2010

Embellishing Text Search Queries To Protect User Privacy, Hwee Hwa Pang, Xuhua Ding, Xiaokui Xiao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Users of text search engines are increasingly wary that their activities may disclose confidential information about their business or personal profiles. It would be desirable for a search engine to perform document retrieval for users while protecting their intent. In this paper, we identify the privacy risks arising from semantically related search terms within a query, and from recurring highspecificity query terms in a search session. To counter the risks, we propose a solution for a similarity text retrieval system to offer anonymity and plausible deniability for the query terms, and hence the user intent, without degrading the system’s precision-recall …


Symphony: A Platform For Search-Driven Applications, John C. Shafer, Rakesh Agrawal, Hady W. Lauw Mar 2010

Symphony: A Platform For Search-Driven Applications, John C. Shafer, Rakesh Agrawal, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present the design of Symphony, a platform that enables non-developers to build and deploy a new class of search-driven applications that combine their data and domain expertise with content from search engines and other web services. The Symphony prototype has been built on top of Microsoft's Bing infrastructure. While Symphony naturally makes use of the customization capabilities exposed by Bing, its distinguishing feature is the capability it provides to the application creator to combine their proprietary data and domain expertise with content obtained from Bing. They can also integrate specialized data obtained from web services to enhance the richness …