A survey on performance evaluation mechanisms for privacy-aware web search schemes

Due to the exponential growth of information on the internet, web search engines (WSEs) have become indispensable for effectively retrieving information. Web search engines store the users’ profiles to provide the most relevant results. However, the user profiles may contain sensitive information, including the user’s age, gender, health condition, personal interests, religious or political affiliation, and others. However, this raises serious concerns for the user’s privacy since a user’s identity may get exposed and misused by third parties. Researchers have proposed several techniques to address the issue of privacy infringement while using WSE, such as anonymizing networks, profile obfuscation, and private information retrieval (PIR) protocols. In this chapter, the authors give a brief survey of the privacy attacks and evaluation models used to evaluate the performance of private web search techniques.