ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

The Magic of Recommendation —

It’s getting to be time to finally put all people who were on the screen for the BBS Documentary up in the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). As part of that, I browsed the entry to remind myself who’s missing.

IMDB has kind of tarted up since it was taken over by Amazon, and in fact it gives good information (generally) but pastes it over with crazy ads and integration into Amazon (although a “buy this right now” link isn’t so bad, even if it’s only for Amazon).

But the recommendations at the bottom got my attention:

Suddenly it became a interesting puzzle: Why was the Amazon/IMDB recommendation engine relating me with upskirt and panties-fetish movies?

I’m theorizing it’s either because they also got high ratings and were direct to video, or that someone named “Jason” is responsible for a lot of the work, including directing and cinematography. But it could be that hundreds of people, after reading my movie’s entry, spontaneously searched for upskirt videos. I don’t know, any of them seem plausible.

Bayesian Classification is fascinating to me, because I don’t get it, not even a little bit, but love the results. So it’s like raytracing, but with information. I just love the outcome. In this case, I’ll bet the engine has an amazing justification for “BBS + direct to video = Tits”, and if so, I WANT THAT ROUTINE.


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3 Comments

  1. Jad@jad.net says:

    I looked at that page and got no such links. Maybe the adverts for upskirt videos is directed at you because of your browsing history or something?

  2. Mojo says:

    I’m guessing “BBS = BBW = Tits”.

  3. Church says:

    Huh. I was going to make a similar snarky comment, but when I checked the page I got the EXACT same lineup of recommendations.

    I thought it might be that I don’t check IMDB that often, and those are the default recommendations, but I have to imagine that Jason checks it fairly often.