# What is search personalization?
Source: https://www.meilisearch.com/docs/learn/personalization/search_personalization

Search personalization lets you boost search results based on user profiles, making results tailored to their behavior.

Search personalization uses AI technology to re-rank search results at query time based on the user context you provide.

## Why use search personalization?

Not everyone search the same way. Personalizing search results allows you to adapt relevance to each user’s preferences, behavior, or intent.

For example, in an e-commerce site, someone who often shops for sportswear might see sneakers and activewear ranked higher when searching for “shoes”. A user interested in luxury fashion might see designer heels or leather boots first instead.

## How does search personalization work?

1. First generate a plain-text description of the user: `"The user prefers genres like Documentary, Music, Drama"`
2. When the user performs a search, you submit their description together their search request
3. Meilisearch retrieves documents based on the user's query as usual
4. Finally, the re-ranking model reorders results based on the user context you provided in the first step

## How to enable search personalization in Meilisearch?

Search personalization is an experimental feature.

If you are a Meilisearch Cloud user, contact support to activate it for your projects.

If you are self-hosting Meilisearch, relaunch it using the [search personalization instance option](/learn/self_hosted/configure_meilisearch_at_launch#search-personalization).

Consult the [search personalization guide](/learn/personalization/making_personalized_search_queries) for more information on how to implement it in your application.