I just left a comment on Danny Sullivan’s article about FaceBook’s claim to be the most used people search engines on the web. My comment was about the difficulty of defining a new technology when people have no frame of reference for it, a challenge that we face regularly at VortexDNA.

The reason that we stumble with the definition is not necessarily because what we do is so impossible to understand. Like I said, it’s just that it’s outside the frame of reference. So all of the usual terms we would use instantly evoke meanings that are not appropriate to us.

Let’s start with the basics: VortexDNA is a recommendation engine. We are not a search engine.

Our technology can be integrated into search engines and ecommerce sites like www.NetFlix.com to deliver more personally relevant search results. So what do you think people think of when they hear that? According to Alex Iskold, they think of personalized recommendation (based on past behavior), social recommendation (similar users), item recommendation (items that go hand-in-hand), or any combination thereof.

Well, we are personalized. But we don’t base our recommendations on past behavior. There is a social recommendation aspect to what we do, but it’s not as straightforward as Alex paints it. Nor do we work on a direct item-to-item link.

We need a new frame of reference. I’m famous for being able to explain complicated things, but I don’t think I’ve done my job properly in this case. I’ll give it one more shot.

The VortexDNA relevance model
Imagine if every person, service, website, and object in the world was given a number, from 1 to 100.

You’ve got number 6.

In this imaginary world, people and things with the same number are relevant to each other. So if you do a search, everything will come up 6, because that’s what’s relevant to you. It doesn’t have to track your history though; it just needs to know that you’ve got number 6. That’s the personal recommendation side.

And how do the numbers get given out? Well, people who are 6 people just are, in the core of their being—it’s the most fundamental expression of what drives them. But it’s not as easy for things. So what happens is that things start to pick up the numbers of the people who are interested in them. If lots of number 6 people buy a book, it becomes a number 6 book. That’s the social recommendation side.

Now, if I were Amazon, and I didn’t know that you had number 6, but you bought three number 6 books, I might recommend you other number 6 books. It wouldn’t matter whether anyone had ever bought that particular combination of books before. That’s the item recommendation side.

This explanation is kind of a childish-sounding attempt, and here is my request: tell me if I’m not making sense. Tell me if you have a better, more simple, more graspable way of conveying what it is our nascent technology does. Most importantly, tell me what you think it could do for you, or not do for you, in your capacity as consumer, SEO, web marketer, ecommerce site or search engine owner. I will be mighty grateful for any input you wish to offer.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 11:39 am and is filed under Personalized search, Relevance, VortexDNA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.