笔记 Collective Intelligence——Introduction to Collective Intelligence

Introduction to Collective Intelligence

Netflix is an online DVD rental company that lets people choose movies to be sent to their homes, and makes recommendations based on the movies that customers have previously rented. In late 2006 it announced a prize of $1 million to the first person to improve the accuracy of its recommendation system by 10 percent, along with progress prizes of $50,000 to the current leader each year for as long as the contest runs. Thousands of teams from all over the world entered and, as of April 2007, the leading team has managed to score an improvement of 7 percent. By using data about which movies each customer enjoyed, Netflix is able to recommend movies to other customers that they may never have even heard of and keep them coming back for more. Any way to improve its recommendation system is worth a lot of money to Netflix.
The search engine Google was started in 1998, at a time when there were already several big search engines, and many assumed that a new player would never be able to take on the giants. The founders of Google, however, took a completely new approach to ranking search results by using the links on millions of web sites to decide which pages were most relevant. Google’s search results were so much better than those of the other players that by 2004 it handled 85 percent of searches on the Web. Its founders are now among the top 10 richest people in the world.
What do these two companies have in common? They both drew new conclusions and created new business opportunities by using sophisticated algorithms to combine data collected from many different people. The ability to collect information and the computational power to interpret it has enabled great collaboration opportunities and a better understanding of users and customers. This sort of work is happening all over the place—dating sites want to help people find their best match more quickly, companies that predict changes in airplane ticket prices are cropping up, and just about everyone wants to understand their customers better in order to create more targeted advertising.