We develop Hide-n-Seek, an intent-aware privacy protection plugin for personalized web search.
In addition to users’ genuine search queries, Hide-n-Seek submits k cover queries and corresponding clicks to an external search engine to disguise a user’s search intent grounded and reinforced in a search session by mimicking the true query sequence. The cover queries are synthesized and randomly sampled from a topic hierarchy, where each node represents a coherent search topic estimated by both n-gram and neural language models constructed over crawled web documents. Hide-n-Seek also personalizes the returned search results by re-ranking them based on the genuine user profile developed and maintained on the client side. With a variety of graphical user interfaces, we present the topic-based query obfuscation mechanism to the end users for them to digest how their search privacy is protected.
The core idea is documented in SIGIR '18 full paper "Intent-aware Query Obfuscation for Privacy Protection in Personalized Web Search" (pdf). Hide-and-Seek also has its own demo paper at SIGIR '18 called "Hide-n-Seek: An Intent-aware Privacy Protection Plugin for Personalized Web Search" (pdf).
Hide & Seek has not yet been published to chrome web store. Feel free to manually install the extension following such steps.
- Download or fork this project to your local environment.
- Open Chrome and go to
chrome://extensions. - Click "load unpacked extension...".
- Select the downloaded project folder.
and you're good to go!
Note:
This project only includes the front-end extension of this whole project, but by default it utilizes back-end programs running on a server, credit to HCDM Group at University of Virginia.