Enhancing Deniability against Query-Logs

Abstract

We propose a method for search privacy on the Internet, focusing onenhancing plausible deniability against search engine query-logs. The method ap-proximates the target search results, without submitting the intended query andavoiding other exposing queries, by employing sets of queries representing moregeneral concepts. We model the problem theoretically, and investigate the practi-cal feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed solution with a set of real querieswith privacy issues on a large web collection. The findings may have implicationsfor other IR research areas, such as query expansion and fusion in meta-search.