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Web Personalization

Are you getting the most out of the Web, or is the Web getting all it can out of you? That's the question the ecommerce industry is wrestling with as Web personalization technology takes off.

The potential is great: With Web personalization, users can get more information on the Internet faster because websites already know their interests and needs.

But to gain this convenience, users must give up some information about themselves and their interests—and give up some of their privacy.

Web personalization is made possible by tools that enable websites to collect information about users.

One of the ways is accomplished by having visitors to a site fill out forms with information fields that populate a database. The website then uses the database to match a user's needs to the products or information provided at the site, with middleware facilitating the process by passing data between the database and the website. An example is Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc.'s ability to suggest books or CDs users may want to purchase based on interests they list when registering with the site.

Cookies may be the most recognizable personalization tools. Cookies are bits of code that sit in a user's Internet browser memory and tell websites who the person is—that's how a website is able to greet users by name.

A less obvious means of Web personalization is collaborative-filtering software that resides on a website and tracks users' movements. Wherever users go on the internet, they can't help but leave footprints. And software is getting better at reading the paths users take across the web to discern their interests and viewing habits: from the amount of time they spend on one page to the types of pages they choose.

Collaborative-filtering software compares the information it gains about one user's behavior against data about other customers with similar interests. In this way, users get recommendations like Amazon's “Customers who bought this book also bought...”

In the future, observers say they expect to see more advanced technology like neutral networks helping e-commerce sites learn more about their customers' behaviors.