A few years ago, we pieced together a recommendation system for this website. You know how this works: you visit a CD or DVD page, and a small aside gives you a list of “other releases you might like.” The old version gave some interesting results, but was usually biased towards best sellers, namely empreintes DIGITALes releases.

These skewed results are now a thing of the past, thanks to a radical rewrite of our suggestions sytem based on the principles laid out in Toby Segaran’s book Programming Collective Intelligence (O’Reilly, 2007).

As with every automated system, you’ve got to somewhat excuse the computer’s candid ignorance of all the mysterious subtleties of human taste. Yet, we have found that the new system, based as it is on stronger statistical principles, gives noticeably better advice, and we hope that they will boldly guide you to new, uncharted waters.

As usual, please don’t hesitate to tell us of your questions and comments. Our suggestion box is at the bottom of each page. —David, webmaster