I’m doing a bit of work around recommendations and recommendations engines at the moment, and I’m finding it really illuminating. The thing I think I’m most surprised by is how unclear the boundaries that surround the whole concept actually are – how everything seems to bleed into surrounding areas – where structure and categorisation bleeds into navigation bleeds into contextualisation bleeds into associations between things which bleeds into tracked user-behaviour in aggregate which bleeds into individual user behaviour patterns. It’s all very… bleedy…
Anyway, so I’m thinking about all this stuff and I start looking at Amazon – and I know I shouldn’t really be surprised but I suddenly get slightly overwhelmed by it. It’s basically just loads of recommendations engines joined together with a tiny fragment of ‘buy a product’ goo. There’s the page that greets you when you arrive (assuming you’re logged in), above which you can click on a page to get specialised recommendations based upon purchases. On every single item you go to there’s a recommendations aspect (people who bought this also bought…) – and then if you add it to your basket, then you get a recommendations page that shows you other things you might like to buy. The same thing happens when you add it to your wishlist. And then there’s the recommendations engine that tracks you around the site, keeps track of every item you’ve looked at and works out descriptions based upon those – that’s called “The Page You Made”. And then there’s the “New for You” page – a set of (you guessed it) recommendations based upon what’s recently been published or released.Then there’s the button that you click to “See more items like the ones in your wishlist”. And then there’s “Your Store”… I wouldn’t be surprised if they tweaked your recommendations depending on where you lived as well.
All of which only makes it worse that seem to think they think I’m obsessed with low-grade sk8ter rawk…