Recommender Watch

For this project, I intend on monitoring everybody's favorite searcher - Google.

If I knew more about recommender sites, I might have branched out a bit. But still, I have tried to have tried to have some fun with this even if it is a familiar site. I have setup a new computer and a brand new user ID in order to not let all of my years of history run over the engine. And, the characteristics of this user ID are quite different than my "real" ID.

As we go forward, I should be able to quickly try things on both machines and check for any variations.

Week 1 Resource

'Reinforcing the Blockbuster Nature of Media': The Impact of Online Recommenders

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1818
Underlying research paper:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=955984

This week's news / resource is an article from the Warton Business School that reviews and comments on some recent research by members of the Warton staff.

The article, and supporting research, suggests that online retailers need to be careful when implementing a recommender system so that they don't continually recommend a short list of items that are supposed to be part of "the Long Tail" of their inventory. Instead of milking more profits from the "Tail" they will simple create more "Blockbuster" sales.

One little tangent in the article was of particular interest to me. Apparently, the whole recommender thing at Amazon was a real after thought. The developer of the original feature was contacted and claims that he was told to stop development of the feature because it would get in the way of a speedy checkout.