[bbulkow]

I worked for a recommendation engine as a service company called aggregate knowledge in 2007 when they got their second round of funding, 25m from kleiner. It was a remarkably lousy business, and they didn't do well.

There was really nothing wrong with the concept. A little JavaScript on the page, a bunch of back end magic, the ability to use a larger data pool because you are collecting from multiple sites.... But people wouldn't pay, and the engagement of recommendations was never that good.

The secret we learned was, after a bunch of math and research, was that 'best in this category and 3 closest adjacent categories works so well in retail that a naive algo did very well.

Better than the fancy math, which once associated the Koran with the sports illustrated swim suit edition ( and vice versa ).

There is a massive data sufficiency problem, and no company with the real data would go into this low end business. Small companies can't get enough data to be relevent.

The world is 10 years later, ml is better understood, so it might all be different now.... Pm me if you are interested in further detail