This paper shortly discusses the main issues related
to the problem of personalizing search. To overcome the “one size
fits all” behavior of most search engines and Information
Retrieval Systems, in recent years a great deal of research has
addressed the problem of defining techniques aimed at tailoring
the search outcome to the user context. This paper outlines the
main issues related to the two basic problems beyond these
approaches: context representation and definition of processes
which exploit the context knowledge to improve the quality of the
search outcome. Moreover some other important and related
issues are mentioned, such as privacy, and evaluation.