Embellishing Text Search Queries To Protect User Privacy

Summary: Embellish queries with decoy terms that mimic genuine term specificity to hide user intent in similarity-based text retrieval. A retrieval scheme computes encrypted relevance scores from the genuine terms only, while decoys remain indistinguishable, preserving precision/recall; empirical evaluation confirms effectiveness. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 10299
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 5.6587785e-05
Overall Rank: 7,273 | 50.11%
DOI: 10.14778/1920841.1920918

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. HweeHwa Pang (Singapore Management University)
2. Xuhua Ding (Singapore Management University)
3. Xiaokui Xiao (Nanyang Technological University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{pang_vldb10,
        title = {{Embellishing Text Search Queries To Protect User Privacy}},
        author = {Pang, HweeHwa and Ding, Xuhua and Xiao, Xiaokui},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '10},
        volume = {3},
        number = {1},
        pages = {598},
        doi = {10.14778/1920841.1920918},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/1920841.1920918},
        year = {2010}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,293	Modular Order-Preserving Encryption, Revisited	2015	SIGMOD	7.5517336e-05
9,086	Privacy Preservation by Disassociation	2012	VLDB	5.3251649e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,031	Authenticating the Query Results of Text Search Engines	2008	VLDB	6.9458015e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,897	Exemplar Queries: Give me an Example of What You Need	2014	VLDB
2	9,086	Privacy Preservation by Disassociation	2012	VLDB
3	3,232	Privacy-preserving Anonymization of Set-valued Data	2008	VLDB
4	4,625	Practical Private Range Search Revisited	2016	SIGMOD
5	7,320	Privacy Implications of Database Ranking	2015	VLDB
6	12,495	Privacy Preservation of Aggregates in Hidden Databases: Why and How?	2009	SIGMOD
7	5,086	Privacy-Preserving Indexing of Documents on the Network	2003	VLDB
8	12,280	Efficiency and Security in Similarity Cloud Services	2013	VLDB
9	12,309	Aggregate Suppression for Enterprise Search Engines	2012	SIGMOD
10	4,031	Authenticating the Query Results of Text Search Engines	2008	VLDB