Personalized Recommendations Without Knowing Anything About You

Personalized search is a hot topic these days. OK, it's been a hot topic for years, and I admit that I've been working on it for most of my career across a couple of startups. Until Nanocrowd, I followed the same path as others: start the process by gathering information about you, the user -- your interests, preferences, ratings, and purchase history. Then, personalize the content I serve up by matching it to your profile.

This sounds like an obvious approach, and it's used by lots of companies. But, it has two obvious problems:

1. It requires you to tell us a lot about yourself before we can make recommendations, and



2. No matter how much we know about you, a preference-matching engine doesn't know about your moods, so it can't adapt recommendations to reflect your current mood.

At Nanocrowd, we want to offer you personalized results the very first time you visit our site. That means we have to deliver personalized recommendations without knowing anything about you.

Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it? Personalized search results and recommendations without knowing you or your personal preferences.

New Approach
At Nanocrowd, we have developed a new approach: we personalize our recommendations for you by gathering and analyzing the comments written by other movie viewers. Thanks to our Reaction Mapping™ technology, we don't have to get inside your head. Instead we learn about the reactions of others and get inside their heads. We figure out how they reacted to movies and group those reactions into Nanogenres -- small groups of similar movies that share a common thread.

When you come to our site looking for a movie to watch, you tell us one of your favorite movies, actors, or directors. That’s all we need to know. We recommend movies you’ll like by understanding why other movie viewers liked what you liked. We don’t just look at their ratings or other movies they thought were similar; we analyze why they liked it.

For example, if you liked "A Very Long Engagement," we show you the 3-word Nanogenres that capture other movie viewers' varied reactions ranging from "War, Drama, Courage" to "Loves, Lover, Touching." You might like movies in both of these Nanogenres, but I bet you know immediately which one sounds fun to watch tonight. Your selection of a Nanogenre tells us exactly what movies to recommend to you. That is the first step in our personalized results. The second step is when you look at the list of movies in that Nanogenre. If you loved "A Very Long Engagement" and the things you loved about it were "War, Drama, Courage," then you will find other movies you love in that Nanogenre.

Put Us To The Test
Still skeptical? Go to nanocrowd.com and test us. Enter the name of one of your favorite movies. See if there's a Nanogenre that captures what you liked about your movie. Look at the list of movies in that Nanogenre -- did we find your favorites? Are you intrigued to check out the ones you haven't seen? That's one of the most fun and surprising experiences of using Nanocrowd -- we make personalized recommendations without knowing anything about you.

posted by Roderic March