Personalization is omnipresent everywhere in today's modern world applications. It is primarily employed to improve user experience by adapting and learning from the patterns and information extracted from the user. There are various methods of making a system learn from the user behaviour. This paper gives a review of some of the techniques used for user profiling and personalisation systems. The paper puts forth the characteristics and advantages of user profiling and why it is so essential in today's world, with specific reference to internet usage. It also explains which factors of the usage should be taken into consideration and the importance of these factors in user profiling. The paper elaborates on the studied techniques with respect to internet usage because of its ever-growing nature, complexity in learning from the vast source, adapting to changes in usage patterns and the ultimate objective of providing a better user experience while being on-line. The commonality and differences in various proposed techniques are also summarised and highlighted. © 2013 IEEE.