Privacy in Search Logs
Michaela Götz, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Guozhang Wang, Xiaokui Xiao, Johannes E. Gehrke · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2009
Search engine companies collect the “database of intentions”, the histories of their users ’ search queries. These search logs are a gold mine for researchers. Search engine companies, however, are wary of publishing search logs in order not to disclose sensitive information. In this paper, we develop a novel algorithm called ZEALOUS that for the first time enables publishing frequent keywords, queries, and clicks from a search log while achieving a very strong privacy guarantee called (ǫ, δ)-probabilistic differential privacy. An extensive experimental evaluation shows that search logs published with ZEALOUS can be used for research on both search quality and search efficiency with little loss in utility. 1