Digg begins beta testing of Recommendation Engine this week
World renowned social bookmarking website Digg is getting new technological update this week, in the form of the Recommendation Engine.
The Recommendation Engine, much as its name implies, will recommend new stories for users to read based on those that fellow Diggers with similar browsing habits have enjoyed. The more websites you Digg, the easier it will become for the system to match you up to new stories that you’ll find interesting.
Digg’s reason for creating the system is interesting too. Digg has essentially become a victim of its own success – given the site’s power to drive enormous quantities of webtraffic around and the sheer volume of users, the Upcoming section is now swamped with over 16,000 stories every single day.
Needless to say, that is making it harder for users to find new stories they want to read.
However, Digg isn’t the only one that will benefit if the system does work out as well as intended. It should also help distribute users more evenly, as well as potentially helping to form micro-communities of similar users within the wider Digg community.
That should mean that smaller more niche topics will stand to gain more form the power of Digg and there may even be a reduction in the site-cripplingly high traffic levels often associated with an unexpected rise in Digg popularity. And lets not forget that cataloguing web browsing activity to summarise the preferences of a user or groups of users will be music to the ears of advertisers.
Here’s a video preview of the Recommendation Engine from Digg’s Kevin Rose.
Digg Recommendation Engine from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.
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