New Amazon Patents on Content Personalization

theodp writes "Defending its decision to concoct recommendations to steer customers to buy items at Amazon's new Apparel Store, a spokeswoman said Amazon "felt it would be evident to people that since the store was so new, we wouldn't have the transaction history to create database similarities." But in this just-published patent applicaton, Amazon earlier told the USPTO it's able to use product viewing histories to determine the similarity or relatedness between products for which little or no purchase history data exists. So which claim should you believe?"

Comments

I think you're mistaken

[clambert]

Amazon does have the technology to recommend items without customers having bought them in the past. They use product viewing history to do this.

In a new store such as Amazon's Apparal section, they don't have the transaction history OR the product viewing history, so they can't accurately recommend products to viewers.

I agreee that maybe they shouldn't be recommending products at all if they have no basis for their recommendations, but their patent doesn't conflict with their policy on Amazon Apparals. Basically, their patent is to allow them to recommend products to customers who haven't BOUGHT anything, but have just browsed through the store enough.

Yes, you can predict from books & cds to cloth

[jerryasher]

Look it all depends on how complex your model is.

Did you buy P.Diddy's CD? Maybe I'll try to sell you something from his line of clothes.

Did you buy a book about basketball? Some red Michael Jordan Boxer shorts and some clean socks.

Did you buy childrens books, toys or CDs? It's Ladybug bug boots for you.

Have you bought anything about Linux? Clean underwear.

Does it matter if they made the recommendations up or not? No. When I ask the waitress for a recommendation for the fish or the steak, I get upset when she asks me for a detailed description of my tastes.

Amazon is a business. If it helps to tell the truth to the patent office. They will. If it helps to shade the truth. That's what the lawyers are for. Same on the PR side.

Molehill!

Any reason why this would be a BAD thing?

[Rogerborg]

Sure, we all hate ads. But when you're actually in the market to buy stuff, wouldn't you rather have relevant ads?

Instead of bitching about the mendacity (they're a .com!) the chilling implications for privacy (oh no, I bought Dianne Wynn Jones, J.K. Rowling'll kick my arse!) or the fucked up patent system (tell your elected representative, we already know), could we not rub our collective brain cells together and try and come up with ways to make this work for our benefit?

For example, more optional steering. Instead of just dumb feeding of ads, why not use the interactivety for mutual benefit? What if there were a little button beside each ad, saying "Not interested" (you don't need an "interested", that's the clickthrough). That way you could at least tell them about ads that actively piss you off (X10?) so that they're not just burning bandwidth. Anyone got any other ideas?