You might also like…

IDEA No 56

COLLABORATIVE FILTERING

Every day there are more webpages to visit, books to buy, music to listen to and films to watch. Search helps us to find stuff we know about – but what about the things we don’t know about?

Collaborative filtering makes predictions about an individual’s interests based on the interests of similar people. The underlying assumption is that if person A has the same opinion as person B on a particular issue, A is more likely to share B’s opinion on a different issue than the opinion of a person chosen at random.

An early adopter of collaborative filtering was Alexa. In 1996, when a visitor arrived at a website, the Alexa toolbar provided a list of websites that had been visited by others who ...

Get 100 Ideas that Changed the Web now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.