State of the Art in Distributed Privacy-Preserving Protocols in Private Web Search

Abstract

Web search engine (WSE) is an inevitable software system used by people worldwide to retrieve data from the web by using keywords called queries. WSE stores search queries to build the user's profile and provide personalized results. User search queries often hold identifiable information that could compromise the user's privacy. Preserving privacy in web searches is the primary concern of users from various backgrounds. Many techniques have been proposed to preserve a person's web search privacy with time. Some techniques preserve an individual's privacy by obfuscating a user's profile by sending fictitious queries with the original ones. Others hide their identity and preserve privacy through unlinkability. However, a distributed technique preserves privacy by providing unlinkability and obfuscation. In distributed protocols, a group of users collaborate to forward each other queries to WSE, providing unlinkability and obfuscation. This work presents a survey of distributed privacy-preserving protocols. The benefits, limitations, and evaluation parameters are detailed in this work.