Fun link from the Snook: The UnSuggester. You enter the title of a book that you have and it tells you which other books you’re least likely to own. He writes: “Interestingly, the first search I did was for The Book of Skulls. Among the unsuggestions are several books in our library – The Lovely Bones, Stitch ‘n Bitch, Little Women, Naked. Hmmm… Those are all yours…” I should upload our bookshelves. Obviously we’d blow the system’s algorithms.
2 responses
That is funny. I put in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” since I happen to be re-reading it currently, and almost all of the unsuggestions are Christian theology. Most of their specific unsuggestions are not books we own, but we have a couple bookshelves devoted to similar theology books. I think their unsuggestions are a tad narrow minded. Or maybe most readers are… but I prefer to think that’s not the case.
I think you have to credit a lot of it to the type of person that would bother cataloguing all their books on the Internet. We’re talking serious nerds here, so I doubt they’re very representative of the rest of us.