BBC's Virtual Revolution & Recommendation Engines

Recommendation Engines Are They a Good Thing?

The BBC programme Virtual Revolution will have brought to the attention of many the fact that today businesses are in effect taking and storing our Electronic DNA. Armed with these facts businesses can and do use the information to decide which adverts and products to show us when we go online, Amazon being one of the major users of this process.

The question is, is this a bad thing? Some say that it is Ok, as it means that their online experience is better and that the information is used to ‘help’ them get the very best out of their online time. On the other hand, some argue that the information is being used to ‘control’ us, to show us things that in essence we ‘should’ like. Those that are worried go on to state that this influences behaviour in a way that has never been possible before and that this influence may not be in the end in our best interest.

How does it work and how far does it go?

Basically, when anyone searches the web and visits a website, the chances are that to some degree or another, the pages you have looked and the products you have viewed and bought will be recorded. This data becomes more accurate when you log into a site (like Amazon), often automatically via cookies. This logging on identifies you and allows the website to really see what you like. When you are not logged on in such a ‘definite’ way, the data recorded is not so easily connected with you as a person, but it is nevertheless useful to business as even thought they don’t know who is searching and looking for things, they know what lots of people do and thus what anyone person is likely to want to see in the future.

This ‘surveillance and recording’ goes on in the free Emails services too (like Gmail) as every email is scanned and keywords extracted from it, this in Google’s example being used to determine what adverts they should show you on the Gmail screen.

So whatever you do your behaviour on the web will be recorded in one way or another and this data will be used in some way by businesses to decide what to show you.

Social Networks

Search behaviour and the sites you visit are not the only way by which business decides what to show you, as they also take into account the info that people share on the web on the Social Network sites. The amount that this is taken into account is I’m sure not fully known yet, but there are rumours in the Search Market place that Google will be using the information ‘contained’ in anyone’s Social Network to decide what to show them when they are searching using Google.

Personalisation or Control?

All of the above basically means that your behaviour (or that of others) will influence what pages, information and products you are ‘served’ on the Internet. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Does this process destroy or damage the ‘serendipity’ that the Web offers, or ‘help’ people get the most out of their online time.

The thing that worries some is that this process influences people in a way that they might not fully realise. This does worry some people quite a lot and one day there may well be a backlash by internet users in that they will demand that their behaviour is not tracked and that they are not given results based on behaviour, whether theirs or someone else’s.

I am not sure what the future holds here, but I do know that today businesses can and do use these methodologies and that the process is becoming more and more refined and also that it’s use is set to increase.

At Serendipity Online Marketing we do assist our customers to make the best use of the data available, for example Keyword Research allows us to see what people are looking for and therefore what terms they should target in SEO and PPC. We also assist businesses make the best out of their websites by the use of Google Analytics. However, we do not, in line with privacy rules that exist today, track people down to an individual level. Instead we simply help our customers present to their customers the best possible browsing experience in the hope that all parties will be best satisfied.

Hopefully this is in order and correct, but we will be keeping a careful check on the ‘morals’ of the web and will never do anything that could be damaging to the end consumer.