Beyond Search is Suggestion
In our previous posts we discussed how the lack of personalization and lack of incentives for a review to be honest and fair, reduced the value of local search reviews by themselves. At theSUGGESTR.com we’ve decided to use a technique called collaborative filtering to provide a more personalized experience by being able to provide personalized suggestions not just search results. Our suggestion engine starts by calculating similarity scores between every pair of users and every pair of businesses. This allows us to ’score’ how similar the taste’s of two users are as well as score how similar two businesses are. These scores are then used in our proprietary algorithm to predict how well our users will like a given business. We believe, as do others, that the future of local search is more of a personalized experience and if you can personalize searches then you begin to enter the realm of suggestion.
Let’s look at a simple example of how this may work. Let’s say User A has rated 5 restaurants in New York, and User B has rated the same 5 restaurants with the SAME SCORE as User A. That would make User A and B have a high similarity score. Now let’s say User A from NY is going to San Francisco for the first time, but User B has been there, theSUGGESTR.com will be able to suggest restaurants to User A based on User B’s rating. Now imagine that process for every combination of users and businesses in our database. The data is combined using our unique algorithm so that we can accurately predict your ratings.
Collaborative Filtering in Action
We realize that our vision of local suggestion will be a marathon not a sprint. We do think we’ve made some great initial steps with features like our similarity meter which allows registered users to quickly see how similar their tastes are with others. Imagine being able to quickly identify which reviews come from people with similar tastes to you.
Also our predictive search allows us to predict how much you’ll enjoy a given business and even explain WHY we’re making the prediction.
We know their are lots of improvements still to be made and we should have some great new features available at theSUGGESTR.com shortly! In the meantime let us know what you think we should do to improve our site.
Local Search Recommendations suggestions theSUGGESTR