Here’s some amazing news on the collaborative filter front — relevancy prediction engine developer CRITEO has made it to the Top 30 leaderboard for the NetFlex Prize, a competition between 13,610 teams to try to beat the current NetFlix prediction engine. What is even more interesting is that the CRITEO engine performs the analyses for this competition in real time, versus most of the competitors that are churning information that can take minutes, hours or even days!

On top of all that, CRITEO offers this predictive engine as a public API right now, and you can try it on your site for free. Check out CRITEO’s DVD recommendation test site to see how quick and relevant their engine is — and realize how this public API can help your site no matter what products, services or articles you cover.

The CRITEO API offers huge opportunities for both online companies as well as brick and mortar service and product providers. The NetFlix system is one that is constantly being beaten up by all of their users — and with a system like CRITEO, the off-site maintenance and management makes great sense since it relegates many responsibilities to a third party, so you can focus on providing your users with the service they want. The API isn’t just for huge companies like NetFlix, though, it also will work great with smaller online merchants and publishers. You can allow your users to find other items or services based on what they’ve used or like, or even allow them to show relevant articles to what they come to your site or blog to read about.

Why just base your relevancy comparisons to keywords and visit popularity when you can actually allow your users to quickly rate their visited pages/items to instantly give them relevant topics? This means you’ll retain them on your site longer, increase the opportunity to offer them what they want, and produce a site that is more competitive than others that not offering relevant advice. Also, an API like the CRITEO engine allows you to offer relevant in-links that are not biased by your views — the relevancy results are only biased by what that particular user has chosen to rate, giving them a unique view of your site and services/products.

Check out the API today — it is free to try, and easy to work with.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 9:30 am and is filed under Collaborative Filtering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.