50. Amazon's Technical Co-Founder and Employee #1, Shel Kaphan
Internet History Podcast
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The Recommendation Engine
There was a number of times when it actually did crash and we were hanging on by the skin of our teeth. Jeff had become an amour did this collaborative filtering outfit and had licensed their software that didn't produce very good results so some programmers started working on what was called similarities. They would analyze the statistics of who had bought what books and what other books and would distill that down into useful links. It wasn't personalized but it did kind of show you know people that were interested in x were also interested in y and that was a good guide for people.
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