

People Who Read This Article Also Read... - slackerIII
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/mar08/6019

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slackerIII
I wonder how much shared accounts complicate recommendation engines like
these. My wife and I both use the same account for netflix and for amazon
purchases. I can't imagine that an outsider looking at our movies and
purchases could make much sense of it.

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tim2
What other people read/buy/like alone is near useless data. Garbage in,
garbage out.

I can't believe people are still trying to wave their hands and pretend they
have some amazing algorithm to turn this data into half useful
recommendations.

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mixmax
Well it works pretty well for Amazon.

And since I discovered lats.fm I have never listened music elsewhere, since
their recommendations hit my (somewhat obscure) taste in music perfectly.

There's definitely data to be mined, and meaningful results to be extracted.
The problem is that the people doing the algorithms are not good enough at
what they do. Admittedly it is not an easy problem.

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pchristensen
Indeed, it's the discovery problem that all of social media is trying to
solve. The web it good at finding something you're looking for, not so great
at finding stuff you would like if you knew it existed. Lots of bucks to the
people that figure it out (last.fm'a acquisition is a good example of that)

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mixmax
Admittedly I haven't had much experience in this field, but it doesn't seem
all that hard. What am I missing? Is it one of those "the devil is in the
details" things?

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pchristensen
Take books for example. I read lots of books, from all different genres
(computer, fiction, history, economics, business, math, etc). How do I find
books to read? If I look on Amazon, it suggests books similar to books I've
already read, but that doesn't help me find books in different categories.
Recommendations on Hacker News will give me a well rounded set of computer and
entrepreneur-related books, but what else? I hear about books in other fields
when they become popular enough to get press on NPR or IT Conversations or
something (like The World Without Us) but mostly it's just random things
mentioned here or there. I actually use an Amazon Wishlist to keep track of
books I hear mentioned, because it might be a year or two before I read it.

As an example of how you can do an excellent job but miss most of the picture,
try the Pandora music service. You choose a song you like and they make you a
radio station full of songs with similar characteristics to the one you
picked. I tried "Fade to Black" by Metallica and it played other metal and
rock songs, but it had no idea I liked classical, Hawaiian, reggae, old school
hip hop, or anything else.

I haven't encountered any recommendation service that was both accurate and
broad. The best way to get recommendations I've found is to know and interact
with different kinds of people (the kind who wouldn't know each other). That
helps fill in the holes.

