New Perspectives on Personalised Search Results: Expertise and
Institutionalisation
Introduction
Personalisation has become a buzzword in contemporary society, suggesting both individualisation
and customisation and it is commonly associated with web-based information
services. The concern to use the interests and attributes of an individual in some way to
refine or target information is not, in itself, new. From the earliest developments of automated
information retrieval, librarians were concerned with questions of the relevance or
search results to individual users. Identifying specific interests and particular preferences
was a key aspect of the reference interview through which a search strategy was developed
for an individual. With the emergence of automated alert services, users could create
profiles which reflected their interests by listing subject headings. As Hearst (2009)
explains, these can be seen as explicit dimensions of personalisation, to be contrasted with
implicit dimensions of personalisation which might be identified through an information
user’s previous behaviours and search history using a web-based system.
When people engage with web search engines, there has been an expectation