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Although personalized search has been under way for many years and many personalization algorithms have been investigated, it is still unclear whether personalization is consistently effective on different queries for different users and under different search contexts. In this paper, we study this problem and provide some findings. We present a large-scale evaluation framework for personalized search based on query logs and then evaluate five personalized search algorithms (including two click-based ones and three topical-interest-based ones) using 12-day query logs of Windows Live Search. By analyzing the results, we reveal that personalized Web search does not work equally well under various situations. It represents a significant improvement over generic Web search for some queries, while it has little effect and even harms query performance under some situations. We propose click entropy as a simple …