Using ODP Metadata to Personalize Search

The Open Directory Project is clearly one of the largest collaborative efforts to manually annotate web pages and export this information in RDF format. This effort involves over 65,000 editors and resulted in metadata specifying topic and importance for more than 4 million web pages. Still, given that this number is just about 0.1 percent of the Web pages indexed by Google, is this effort enough to make a difference? We will start by discussing how these metadata can be used to personalize search, and then show that personalized search using ODP and other directory metadata is feasible already today. We will focus on two ways of doing this, first by directly using ODP and similar metadata, and second by biasing on and thus automatically extending these metadata to the whole web