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When Purchase Recommendations Go Bad
nixman99 writes "An article on MSNBC describes what happens when 'View Similar Products' recommendations go bad. From the article: 'The company said it was alerted to the problem early yesterday afternoon after word began spreading among bloggers. When visitors to Walmart.com requested Planet of the Apes: The Complete TV Series on DVD, four other movies were recommended under the heading Similar Items. Those films included Martin Luther King: I Have A Dream/Assassination of MLK and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.'"
Planet Of The Apes - Social Commentary.
Martin Luther King - Import changer of society.
That would explain the recommendation if it were to come up on Amazon.com, but Walmart.com used a less intelligent linking system. From AFA (another f'ing article), Wal-Mart manually assigns DVDs to categories, and then will pass on the recommendation if you're browsing from the same category. So it has nothing to do with user habits.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Maybe because back when racism was still very much overt in the early 2/3rds of the 1900s, blacks were often likened to monkeys and apes, by white people. Many racist whites/hate groups still do. Heck black soldiers fighing over in France during the World War were ridiculed by people asking could they see their {monkey} tails.
Amazon.com bases their reccomendations on pages visited, not just the products which were purchased.