The Art, Science and Business of Recommendation Engines - 0 views
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A good recommendation engine can make a difference not just for Netflix, but for any online business. This is because there are two fundamental activities online - Search and Browse. When a consumer knows exactly what she is looking for, she searches for it. But when she is not looking for anything specific, she browses. It is the browsing that holds the golden opportunity for a recommendation system, because the user is not focused on finding a specific thing - she is open to suggestions.
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The main approaches fall into the following categories:
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Personalized recommendation - recommend things based on the individual's past behavior Social recommendation - recommend things based on the past behavior of similar users Item recommendation - recommend things based on the thing itself A combination of the three approaches above
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Like Netflix, all 3 are key to the Quickflix approach.
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"In October last year, Netflix launched an unusual contest. The online movie rental company is offering 1 million dollars to anyone who can improve their recommendation engine by 10%. Netflix is known for its innovation and bold moves and in the grand scheme of things, $1M is not a lot of money for such a business."