I'm interested in what folks thought of the article in the Times today
regarding Amazon's management intervening, after receiving complaints, to
alter the way their software responds to a search query for "abortion."
This points to a situation in which commercial entities (who often actually
strive to mask the very mechanism of how their systems "magically" identify
related searches) are in a bit of a quandary when the objective application
of software algorithms to offer up "related" searches provides results that
might offend some number of customers. There is a related anecdote about a
Wal-Mart collaborative-filtering system ("people who watched/enjoyed movie
X also watched/enjoyed movie Y") that ran into similar problems.
It seems like these systems could create delicate PR situations for
management whether they work "right" or whether they work "wrong" from a
pure information-retrieval, relevance, perspective.
As both collaborative-filtering systems for suggesting additional
results/items/products and similar systems for identifying "related
searches" become more common (and potentially very powerful) tools in the
world of search and retrieval, it is an interesting thought experiment to
ponder how the reactions of Amazon and other commercial entities to
"unwanted" results will differ from what would result from the application
of library norms to these types of searching/matching technologies.
The opacity of the (trade-secret) search-suggesting and
collaborative-filtering algorithms used in the commercial world are also,
of course, an interesting contrast to what libraries might do and, by
masking for the casual user what is really behind the suggestion systems,
may contribute to the "need" for the companies to politically duck and
cover. For how many searches besides "abortion" has Amazon made tweaks
that *weren't* made public? Should we care?
March 20, 2006
Amazon Says Technology, Not Ideology, Skewed Results
By LAURIE J. FLYNN
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/technology/20amazon.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C. Andrew Larrick
Reference Librarian
Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, Columbia University
tel: (212) 854-3083
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 14 2007 - 20:46:24 PST