A Guide to Recommender Systems - ReadWriteWeb. We're running a special series on recommendation technologies and in this post we look at the different approaches - including a look at how Amazon and Google use recommendations.
The Wikipedia entry defines "recommender systems" as "a specific type of information filtering (IF) technique that attempts to present information items (movies, music, books, news, images, web pages, etc.) that are likely of interest to the user. " That entry goes on to note that recommendations are generally based on an "information item (the content-based approach) or the user's social environment (the collaborative filtering approach). " We think there's also a personalization approach, which Google in particular is focused on.
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