I’ve implemented a new feature that I hope will prove to be helpful: each time you search for something, just underneath the big search input, you’ll find a small “Remember” link – press it, and Emmy will remember your query (you can tell her to forget it afterwards).

This way, if you have entered many bands, movies and books (in one search), to better describe your taste and to get more recommendations, you won’t have to re-type all your favourite stuff next time you visit Emmy. It’s like a very straightforward profile-saving function. One thing though, Emmy is able to remember just one of your searches at a time, so telling her to “remember” something will make her “forget” about any previous remembered searches. I hope you’ll like it :)

A couple of days ago I have uploaded a series of updates that I have been working on for a while.

The most important update probably is Emmy’s knowledge base itself, that I have rebuilt from scratch. It is definitely more comprehensive and accurate now, and I truly hope this reflects in the quality of Emmy’s recommendations. I am aware that some of the users may still be disappointed with her results, but I am making efforts to improve her ability to provide relevant recommendations to more and more different inquiries.

Besides giving better suggestions, Emmy is now able to provide further information for the majority of the stuff she recommends. Until this update, only a limited number of resources had a Wikipedia description available. Now, for almost all the bands, movies, and, for the first time, for books also, Emmy is happy to present you the begging of the Wikipedia article of that particular resource. This way, I hope you will be able to make a better first impression on the things suggested to you.

Some less visible updates have been made also. For example, you can now search for up to 20 items (given as input to Emmy), separated by commas. Up until now, the limit was 10 items, and the few of you who actually tried to give her 10 bands, movies and/or books to better describe your taste, would have probably experienced a longer execution time. Now, Emmy is able to grasp, process and make her recommendations upon your input much faster, and for double to number of resources given as input.

Another less visible update is that now Emmy, besides improving her “Did you mean” feature, has also learned some common spelling mistakes and abbreviations.

To give you just a few examples: beatles, bjork, alanis morriset, linkinpark, rhcp, amélie, lotr, soad, beethoven.

A useful update is that you can now specify the type of your input, and also request a type for the recommended items. There are cases when the same name can stand for a band name and for a movie title in the same time, for example. Now, if Emmy assumes wrong about what you are trying to tell her that you like, you can mention her the type by using the “band:”, “movie:” or “book:” operators.

For example: band:underworld, movie:harry potter, book:trainspotting.

Also, you can specify what type of stuff you want to receive as recommendations, that is, band and artists, movies or books. This can be useful in many cases, interesting, and fun to play with sometimes.

For example: the beatles//movies, fight club//music, pulp fiction//books.

There is still a lot of work to do in order to make Emmy wise enough to provide the vast majority of her users with interesting, relevant recommendations they haven’t heard of before, but I hope these updates will prove to be a step forward in accomplishing this mission.

Searching for TasteKid on Google no longer triggers a “Did you mean: Taste Kid” message (with the blank space between “taste” and “kid”).

Fight Club has been the most searched movie on TasteKid in the last month. It seems many people struggle to hide the Tyler Durden in them :)