Web personalization and personalized recommendations are recently gaining more and more interest. Companies like Amazon, Google, Netflix, The New York Times, Facebook, Twitter, … already personalize their products in different ways. If you take Google’s search results as an example. Have you ever noticed that a friend of you gets different search results as you do for the same search query? If you never have noticed just try it out it’s really worth noting. Another example are Amazon’s product recommendations which are for example based on your purchases, your product ratings and so on.

Eli Pariser explains in the following TED Talk how “human information filters” get substituted by algorithmic ones, which means how recommendation engines filter information for you. Have a look at the video is is really worth watching:

Do you know other examples of web personalization or recommendations engines? Please leave me a comment at the end of this post.

Related articles

• Who Decides What You Read? Hint: It’s Not You (bigthink.com)
• TED 2011: Junk Food Algorithms and the World They Feed Us (wired.com)
• Gatekeepers Make a Lot of Sense (pravdam.com)