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Last active January 22, 2024 13:53
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Understanding search and recommendations

How are search and recommendations the same, and how are they different?

TL;DR:

  • The design of both search and recommendations is to find and filter information
  • Search is a "recommendation with a null query"
  • Search is "I want this", recommendations is "you might like this"
  • In recommendations, man "is this search query", from Computing Taste by Nick Seaver
  • Search and recommendations are at opposite ends of an extreme spectrum
  • Search is more about retrieving information versus filtering for preferences, and in search the user has more agency versus recommendations where the recommender system has more agency

Marcia Bates on Search Systems:

  • People like to see where topics are embedded in the contextual landscape because effective searching is not intuitive and there is no explicit index for search strategies

Michael Ekstrand on search vs recsys

  • Search is directed information-seeking and we care about
  • Item properties
  • User properties (preferences and interaction history)
  • Query
  • Context

In general, these things make up the following formulation:

Screen Shot 2023-01-07 at 10 15 24 AM

  • Item + User context: Traditional recommendations:
  • Item + Query context: Non-personalized search
  • Context + user: context-aware recommender
  • item, query, query, context: Context-aware personalized search

Resources

Books

Papers

Sites/Talks/Posts

IMG_2941

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