Scams hold back personalised search

ID theft and phishing could kill the promise of better search results

The growth of identity theft and phishing scams could kill the promise of more personalised search technologies, Steve Berkowitz, chief executive at Ask.com told vnunet.com in an interview.  

"The benefits to the user will be incredible, but whether the user will allow those benefits to happen over time is something that we have to wait and see," he said.

Personalised search is considered the next frontier for search technologies. By collecting data about the user, including most visited websites and past queries, an online service could deliver better results.

A personalised search engine should be able to determine whether a query for 'bass' comes from a fishing enthusiast or music lover.

But because such services need to track a user over a period of time, they represent a potential privacy and security risk.

"It's going to take a lot of time before users are going to trust putting a lot of information into the computer, when there are scams that go on and you keep reading about credit card and identity theft," said Berkowitz.

"The user will benefit from the ability of the technologies to understand more about them to make search more relevant and to make information retrieval more relevant. But it will take time and probably more than people anticipate."

In the meantime services are likely to offer personalisation configured by the user, argued Berkowitz. RSS feeds allow Ask.com to learn about user preferences without putting privacy at risk.

By incorporating online RSS readers like Ask's Bloglines service, web portals can still learn to better serve their users, according to Berkowitz.

"You are not giving us any personal information. I consider that personalised information delivery," he said.

Ask Jeeves is the fourth largest search engine, behind Google, Yahoo and MSN. The most recent figures from analyst firm ComScore put the firm's share at 6.1 per cent of search queries in the US.

All major search engines are working on offering content based on users' personal interests, although they all require them to manually configure the services.

Google started to allow users to add custom content to the service's front page earlier this year, and offers a 'search history' that tracks past searches that over time could be used to deliver personalised results.

Yahoo has been offering a similar service for years with its my.yahoo.com. Ask Jeeves offers My Jeeves, a service that offers online storage of past search queries and their results, similar to bookmarks.

• The full interview with Steve Berkowitz is available here.