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geekchick ([personal profile] geekchick) wrote2002-09-20 11:59 am
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*snicker* Er, yeah... Thanks, Amazon.

Your Recommendations:
Adultery


("Adultery" is the title of a book, and it was recommended to me because I just looked at The Mistress: Histories, Myths and Interpretations of the Other Woman and they built my recommendations around that. I'm greatly amused.)

Oh, I should've gotten a screenshot, as now they tell me they're recommending the Kurosawa box set. *laugh*
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[identity profile] curiousangel.livejournal.com 2002-09-20 09:01 am (UTC)(link)
Whatever gets you through the night, I suppose. :)

[identity profile] brian1789.livejournal.com 2002-09-20 09:49 am (UTC)(link)
*splutter*

LOL... I needed that *)

"box set"...? Hmmm.

[identity profile] hopeforyou.livejournal.com 2002-09-20 11:03 am (UTC)(link)
Yes, a screenshot would have rocked. That's too funny. BTW, Kurosawa is pretty good...I love his film, "Dreams".

Amazon gets confused easily

[identity profile] telnar.livejournal.com 2002-09-20 02:21 pm (UTC)(link)
I recently looked through my recommendations for the first time, and some of them are a lot harder to trace than yours. For example, Amazon recommended a wide angle camera lens because I bought "From Beiruit to Jerusalem". It also thought that my purchase of "Taliban" and "SQL Server 2000 Unleashed" was reason to recommend a Toshiba e310 Pocket PC. Other choices were at least in the same medium, but seemed to have little other relationship (e.g. "Sex and the City"'s 3rd season leading to "Oceans Eleven"). In only one case, could I spot a common thread: "Bias" begetting "Slander" (Amazon decided I was a conservative, I guess).

I find these things funny also in much the same way that I got a good laugh out of the anecdote in "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" where the author has a computer plot random curves and then showed them to technical analysts for their opinions. In one case, the analyst recommended buying and asked for the name of the stock so he could purchase it right away. It's amazing the degree to which meaningless information properly presented can convince people (I assume that some people buy recommended products, or Amazon would stop doing it).

Telnar
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