Taobao Launches Collaborative Recommendation

Written by Luyi Chen on October 18, 2008
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Taobao LogoTaobao, the biggest C2C/B2C service of China, has just launched personal portal called iTaobao. If you have added any friends in Taobao, you will be able to have a glance of their latest favorite goods.

What it really does is to recommend goods and stores to users according to their browsing and purchasing history. The main section of the page shows 8 recommended goods for you. You will be able to filter the result via 5 category. This way you will get more focused 8 recommendation for specific category. Below that, it recommends 4 stores for you with their latest 4 listed goods.

There’s no clue what’s the main technology used in this recommendation, but we believe collaborative filtering does the main job. An interesting finding is that if you use two deferent browsers to visit the site, you will get very different recommendation result. It seems that it records some history information via cookie and stored in user’ computer.

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