Personalized mining of web documents using link structures and fuzzy concept networks

Personalized search engines are important tools for finding web documents for specific users, because they are able to provide the location of information on the WWW as accurately as possible, using efficient methods of data mining and knowledge discovery. The types and features of traditional search engines are various, including support for different functionality and ranking methods. New search engines that use link structures have produced improved search results which can overcome the limitations of conventional text-based search engines. Going a step further, this paper presents a system that provides users with personalized results derived from a search engine that uses link structures. The fuzzy document retrieval system ( constructed from a fuzzy concept network based on the user's profile) personalizes the results yielded from link-based search engines with the preferences of the specific user. A preliminary experiment with six subjects indicates that the developed system is capable of searching not only relevant but also personalized web pages, depending on the preferences of the user. (C) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.