[codetrotter]

> There is a tendency for services to be scared of ever returning nothing, and instead they will return things that they think are related to your query but really aren't.

With Netflix I assume they use data from IMDb for finding similar movies.

But one platform having particularly surprising ability to find “similar” things is AliExpress.

On AliExpress if you search for a brand and model of something without saying what it is, AliExpress is still sometimes able to know what kind of thing you are looking for and show similar products from other brands. And I’ve been wondering how they do that.

Maybe AliExpress has a big database of products that they scrape from the internet and classify, even for brands and models that have never been on AliExpress.

Or they could be able to do it based on similar queries that people made in the past where someone for example included extra keywords about what they were looking for. Or those people first having searched for a brand name and model and then made subsequent searches for more generic descriptions of what they looked for.

Or sellers could be including names of brands and models for products that are similar in the description or other input fields for metadata for their listings.