1. A method, performed by physical and tangible computing functionality, for providing personalized results to a particular user, comprising: receiving a query from the particular user u who intends to find results that satisfy the query with respect to a topic T u , the user being characterized by user information θ u ; producing a generic topic distribution Pr r (T|q) associated with the query q that is germane to a population of generic users; producing a user-specific query-dependent topic distribution Pr(T u |q,θ u ) associated with the query for the particular user; generating personalized results for the particular user based on the generic topic distribution Pr r (T|q) and the user-specific query-dependent topic distribution Pr(T u |q,θ u ); and forwarding the personalized results to the user.