I’ve done a small update that should improve Emmy’s recommendations when you search for more than one artist, movie or book. Until now, the recommendations were weighting towards the more popular resource (e.g.: if you were searching for The Beatles and something else, the results were very close to the ones given when searching for only The Beatles). Now, the items you provide are treated in an equally manner, thus the recommendations should be more accurate.

I have just deployed the latest version of Emmy’s knowledge base. Built on top of more than double the information that the previous version was using, it allows Emmy to give better, more accurate, and also more up to date recommendations for a larger variety of bands, artists, movies and books. There is, and there will always be room for improvement, but this is an important step forward. Hoping even more people will discover interesting resources using this service, I continue to work in order to provide you with more pleasant surprises and improvements.

Oh, and thanks again for all the encouraging feedback you’re sending!

As for today, Emmy is also available on Twitter. This Twitter bot is presented as an alternative for the main website, especially for all you Twitter addicts out there :)

How it works: just tweet something like :”@tastekid the beatles, madonna” and, in about 30 seconds, you should receive a reply with Emmy’s recommendations for The Beatles and Madonna. I’ve just released this bot, so, if you notice any bugs or anything that doesn’t seem to work, I would appreciate if you would drop me a line.

Hope this helps!

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.

A couple of weeks ago I’ve started doing some changes on Emmy’s learning processes. What am I trying to do is basically increasing Emmy’s knowledge base and providing better quality recommendations.

This new redesigned engine is currently in testing, and it will take some time until its knowledge will be used on the public version of TasteKid. If everything goes well, I expect this to happen in about a month or so.

I will describe in further depth these updates when that time will come. Until then, Emmy continues to improve herself using the existing engine. Some of the time constrains are related to the limitations of the available hardware, so I think I will open myself a little bit more to sponsorship opportunities in the near future.

Sixteen years old Ian wrote to Emmy a few hours ago:

“What happened with the recommendations? They used to be so much better. Whenever I would look for Forrest Gump recommendations my 4 other favorite movies came up (The Shawshank Redemption, Gladiator, Braveheart, The Green Mile) on the list, proving that the system you were using before was working since those are my 5 favorite movies. Now only The Green Mile came up and movies like The Terminal and Cast Away are up top. Did you change how you did this? If so, the old way worked much better.”

I would like to publicly answer to this feedback and explain a little bit what is happening.

Dear Ian, first of all I would like to thank you for using this service and, moreover, for proving me with this feedback. Yes, you are right, a major change has happened, a couple of days ago. You see, Taste Kid’s main goal is to be a discovery engine, to help people explore their taste by finding out about new bands, artists, movies and books. Many people that are using Emmy (including myself) felt that the suggestions where becoming more and more oriented towards popular stuff. Your personal example is great for that matter: you where searching for “Forrest Gump”, and you where given recommendations like The Shawshank Redemption, Gladiator, Braveheart and The Green Mile. Although these are all great movies, it is very unlikely that you haven’t already seen them. I was myself searching for some of my favorite bands or movies, and even though the recommendations where good, I was rarely discovering something new.

To give an example, check the results for Metallica:

http://www.tastekid.com/ask?q=metallica (new/current way)

http://www.tastekid.com/ask?q=metallica&old=1 (old way)

As you can see, using the old approach, the second recommendation for “Metallica” was “Nirvana”. Now, I’m sure people trying to discover new bands somewhat similar to “Metallica” aren’t looking for “Nirvana”; whether they like this band or not, they have most certainly already heard of it.

Given all these, I have decided to make a change. I have changed the formula that determines the relevancy of each result in a way that encourages less popular items to achieve good scores. This is a big gamble for Taste Kid. Up until now, people found it hard to disagree with the results, but, in the same time, they where rarely discovering something new. Now, by promoting less popular items, there is a much bigger chance to screw-up and to get reactions like yours. But I think it’s worth it. Since I’ve performed this change, I have personally discovered several interesting bands and movies that I haven’t heard of up until now. I’m sure there are even better ways of computing this relevancy, but I feel that the new formula is a step forward.

So give it some faith and play with it a little. While the new results have a bigger chance of containing things that you don’t like, in the same time, there is a bigger chance of finding a few things that you will like, and you haven’t heard of before. And this is ultimately Emmy’s goal :)