The Recommender System on Amazon.com

The idea that recommender systems give relevant and useful information about what is being recommended, what is similar and potentially useful, was the basis for our first assignment. We looked at how amazon.com recommended books purchased by those who had bought a particular book. However, amazon.com seemed to have two methods of recommending books: one for fiction and one for non-fiction. Fiction books recommended other fiction books by the same author, and eventually recommended similar subjects written by authors of similar background. Non-fiction books recommended other non-fiction books of similar subject, with a wide variety of authors.

I want to look at how this system quantifies books without qualifying them, except in the review process, which doesn’t seem that helpful. I say this because my own experience of purchasing four books recommended because others bought them as they had also purchased the book I originally purchased, was disappointing. For example, I purchased Plein Air Painters of the North, a non-fiction book with some excellent art history essays and a lot of color plates of Northern Californian artist’s works, where the subject matter was typically landscape and painted during the period from 1885 to 1940. Amazon recommended California Impressionists. The reviews were all very positive. However, the essays in the recommended book were not as academically focused, or as historically relevant, and the works tended more towards flowery still-life or portraiture and overall, while it is a handsome book, I found it half as informative and helpful in the research I was doing.

I want to compare the “recommendation” systems in real space at book stores to amazon.com’s system, as well as look at a couple of other recommended systems, to see if there might be a way to improve the recommendation system at amazon.com. Areas to look at include how employees in real space stores recommend works, what other methods of recommending stores use, and how useful those recommendations are. Then, comparing those real space recommendations, which in the past I have found more helpful, to online recommendations, I want to look at where the differences are or patterns of differences that might help to see where this system is not working as well.