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I wish this was true. I would love to be able to go to e.g. Amazon and just find something I didn't know I wanted recommended to me on the front page. Instead, the only things on there are advertisements for Amazon Prime affiliate services; the list of things in my wishlist/saved items/recently browsed; and some objectively (i.e. un-customized) "hot" items in categories it knows I browse. Meanwhile, the thing I might want, if only I knew about it? It's not on the front page; it's not on the hot or new pages; and it's not anywhere near the first page of results for any search I do. These are SEO death-zones, where I just see 1000 optimized contenders for the one boring highest-profit-margin product. Instead, to find genuinely-interesting new products, I have to go into particular micro-categories, and then browse through ~20 pages of irrelevant same-y things to get past the micro-category's own SEO death-zone. (Even within e.g. the "Scientific Instruments" category, the first ten pages are all either N95 masks or brewing equipment, rather than, y'know, beakers and test strips and CO2 monitoring equipment and such. I know why—they don't re-rank per the browsing habits of the other people who've viewed a given category, but instead reuse the item's global rank in all categories it appears in—but it's still ridiculous.) I mean, maybe I'm an outlier; I watch YouTube reviews of life-hack tools, kitchen gadgets, etc., so most "novelties" aren't all that novel to me. When I'm looking for "something I don't know about", I more mean "something that would excite me, but which nobody within my filter-bubble is excited about yet." But surely an AI could deduce a ranking algorithm that would show people like me what they want to see, right? I feed it plenty of training data in terms of what I do and don't bookmark/save on the site. It just needs to think one level up from "tags" / "similar users." And the weird thing is, I feed plenty of data on exact products I've been interested in in the past to every service I use. Like I said, I watch YouTube videos about e.g. knock-off portable game consoles; I search Google for those products, say things about them in Facebook Messenger, etc. I know I'm getting my privacy invaded by these services—the least they can do is to actually use that information to get me a "recommended" product listing for the thing I'm considering buying! |