Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Collaborative Filter theory.
Author: Paul Snively Posted: 11/10/1999; 11:54:27 AM Topic: Collab filtering at my.userland.com? Msg #: 12942 (In response to 12938) Prev/Next: 12941 / 12943
-- wrote:But we're not talking about search engines, we're talking about collaborative filters.
The distinction is in presentation, not technology: Google is effectively a collaborative-filtering search engine.
Large quantities of data are more important for a collaborative filter than the cleverness of the algorithm.
I would certainly have to agree with this, and in fact, I think I was remiss in posting my earlier numbered "real-world" considerations for the poor fellow who just wanted a simple solution: the one I outlined without taking into consideration the numbered points would almost certainly be adequate for his purposes.
There's a remarkable amount of guessing going on in general. Allow *me* to cite a specific example: www.alexlit.com. After providing specific opionions on a select number of works, you're presented with (by default) twenty titles of works of literature you're predicted to enjoy, ranked by a combination of the level of enjoyment and confidence in the prediction. If you happen to want more than twenty, you can click "next" and get the next twenty out of a list that typically includes thousands of titles.
Sorting *is* screening. There's no theoretical benefit to "protecting" somebody from the less close matches: assume they're intelligent enough to figure out for themselves when the results have crossed the line of irrelevance. They can do a lot better job than you can in most cases.
I think we're in vehement agreement here: the only thing I was arguing against was literally presenting all matches at once. Saying "here are the best 20 and here's how you get to the others if you want to" is perfectly reasonable.
This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:53:27 PM.
© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.