Web personalization involves customizing content for individual users based on their behavior and preferences. There are three main methods of personalization: implicit, which monitors user search history and details; explicit, which allows users to select their interests; and hybrid, which combines implicit and explicit. Personalization aims to provide relevant information to users without requiring explicit requests, using content-based filtering of user profiles or social/collaborative filtering based on interests of similar users. Combining social and content-based filtering with an item ontology can improve recommendations for sparse user data.