Two Decades of Recommender Systems at Amazon.com

Each person who comes to Amazon.com It's as if you walked into a store and the shelves started rearranging themselves, with what you might want moving to the front, and what you're unlikely to be interested in shuffling further away. The algorithms aren't magic; they simply share with you what other people have already discovered. The algorithm does all the work. It's computers helping people help other people, implicitly and anonymously. Since we wrote about the algorithm in IEEE Internet Computing in 2003,2 it has seen widespread use across the Web, including YouTube, Netflix, and many others.