Give me back my recommendations!
I used to like Amazon’s recommendation feature, with recommendations based on my purchase history. I actually used it regularly to browse the Amazon site, looking for new and interesting stuff. Quite often, I’d end up ordering a couple of the recommended books. Very nice!
Recently, though, they’ve changed something in the system and now I hate it. Now, recommendations are based on stuff you look at, or you’ve looked at in the past. This sounds like an idea a computer guy would come up with and quickly implement, over the weekend. In reality, it’s terrible. You just look at one book about veruccas — not because you’re actually interested, but because someone you sorta kinda know mentioned this book as a possible birthday present and you’re checking to see how much it costs — suddenly your whole recommendation list and “personal page” is full of unpleasant-looking books about weird foot diseases (with a foot-fetish softporn book thrown in for good measure).
That’s not a recommendation. Thats like an extremely pushy bazaar stall owner trying to aggressively sell me every single thing I happen to look at. Also, it seems that every time I look they’ve moved the button for clearing my viewing history into a new hard-to-find place in the menu.
Amazon - give me back my recommendations. I want to spend my money!
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March 18th, 2006 at 8:01 pm
[…] Some sites are getting there, some are really screwing it up. See my previous Amazon Recommendations rant. Just looking at something on a bookshelf is not expressing interest. At least not on the Web, where you can follow a link and end up somewhere you didn’t even know you were going. So that’s not what I want. But something like it. Only better. Done right. And across sites — which will probably never happen (or only happen once Google has bought up ALL internet businesses and they’re no longer competing). […]
April 5th, 2006 at 8:15 pm
Why don’t you just log out of Amazon before browsing around?
I’d think about 50% of recommend it users would like the new way and the other half like the old way.