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...the marketing algorithms used by big online retailers. It's not too hard, just establish an account at E-Bay or Amazon and make a couple of purchases and do a few searches. In a short time, they create a "your store" marketing device to suggest other stuff you might want. By going through their recommendations and noting stuff you are NOT interested in, stuff you already have, etc., you generate MORE suggestions. As you watch the program try to identify stuff that will appeal to you, you start getting a picture of how it works.
There are several items that are commonly used:
First, the "talent." For books, it's the author, for CD's it's the artist and/or composer, for DVDs, it's the director and the principal actors.
Second, the "themes." These are keyword-based identifiers that are attached to each item in several ways. In some cases, the product source actually supplies the keywords with the item, dumping them directly into the retailer's software. In some cases, a staffer at the retailer has to enter them manually, usually from the "blurbs" supplied by the product source, but occasionally from online reviews and comments by readers. In some cases, the program "counts" the repetitions of words from master list, words used by readers/shoppers/reviewers to comment about the product on the retailer's website. A word appears a certain number of times in the product's comment stream, it gets dumped into the "theme" keyword file.
Third, the "genre." Similar to keywords, these are tags assigned by someone (I suspect both product and retailer sources) to describe the general type of product. "Screwball comedy" for example, or "noir thriller," etc. A product may have more than one genre tag.
All of these items (and possibly others) accumulate in the product's ID file. As the "If you liked..." subroutine performs searches to match each item with other items, to put those "Similar items" etc., displays on the item's home page (or on your personal marketing file,) it searches through the ID files of all the other products and "matches" based on whatever level of similarity is programmed to confirm a "match."
Those criteria definitely include "talent." This results in some fairly ludicrous matches, as the list will sometimes throw up suggestions of ANYTHING that the headline talent has ever done, no matter how different in style, theme, etc. For instance, if you really loved Katherine Hepburn and happened to order "Rooster Cogburn and the Lady," future suggestion lists will throw up everything John Wayne ever made, even if you've never even LOOKED at another Western and have never shown any interest in Wayne.
The same rote silliness occurs based on "theme" and "genre" matches. The search algorithm is rarely refined to the point where the program can identify really silly juxtapositions and exclude them. In this case, I STRONGLY suspect, based on many, many hours of examining these algorithms in action, that the studio identifies "POTA" as having the "theme" of race relations. The idiot Wal-Mart search/match algorithm dutifully went out and looked at the most popular (biggest selling) OTHER items that had "race relations" somewhere in their ID file, for some reason, and tossed them up onto the page. Wal-Mart's search/match engine is pretty primitive compared to some. If it had been (for example) Amazon, there would have been not only all those biopics and books about African Americans involved in the civil rights struggle (yes, that includes Tina Turner, Dorothy Dandridge, etc.,) but dozens more about revolutions, about apes, about alternate civilizations, etc. Along with every film ever made by Charlton Heston (what a hoot!) Roddy Macdowell, Rod Serling, etc. Probably the collected "Twilight Zone" episodes as well.
However, the Wal-Mart search/match is not nearly so comprehensive. They cut off at fewer items, for one thing, and I'm betting that they have limiters based on what's currently in stock, how many units have already been sold, similar price points, etc.
Do you really think those cheap shitheels at Wal-Mart would actually PAY enough human labor (even racist scum labor) to individually sit down and compile "match" lists for every one of millions of products?
Feh. As far as I'm concerned, they just got nailed by a really evil kwinkydink in their programming system. Couldn't happen to a nicer set of assholes, but I doubt anyone at Wallyworld was sitting around chuckling evilly, twirling their moustaches, and rubbing their hands about making the "monkeys/blacks" connection on the POTA webpage. The fact that they had to actually have some human programmer go in and change the system by hand is punishment enough... probably cost them all of thirty-seven cents in labor costs. Oh, the horror of it!!!
amusedly,
Bright
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