Slightly Spooky Experience With Amazon

I was browsing amazon.co.uk looking for books by the Jesus Seminar. One of these is "The Gospel of Jesus (according to the Jesus Seminar)". I ordered it, and got that "other Items you might enjoy" page. Usually it recommends books I bought years ago. This time it came up with a load of Zen books (Suzuki, Watts, that sort of thing, many of which I have), which was a bit odd, given that I'd just bought a book on Jesus. "The Gospel of Jesus (according to the Jesus Seminar)" must be about the kind of Jesus that people who are interested in Zen like, I guess.

Anyway, one of these Zen books was new to me, Philip Toshio Sudo's Zen Guitar. Now, I play the guitar, at least: I own a guitar and play with it, so I had a look. It seems like it might be a pretty cool book, so I ordered that, too. The "other items I might enjoy" were all guitar books, this time. But..."Customers who bought titles by Philip Toshio Sudo also bought titles by these authors": blah, blah, KentBeck, MartinFowler, blah, blah. What!? Zen Guitar isn't even in the bibliography of ExtremeProgrammingExplained (I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been).

So, what does this tell us about: fans of the Jesus Seminar, guitarists with a philosophical bent, Kent and Martin?

A slightly shaken -- KeithBraithwaite

Kent is a classical guitarist. I'd bet that's the guitar-to-Beck-and-Fowler link.

That Kent plays guitar is an interesting bit of information perhaps, but do you think Amazon generates "other items you might enjoy" from a database that holds that fact?

Keith, did you happen to use a reverse time machine in the past few days? Since you've bought all those books, it seems like the the most reasonable hypothesis is that you've reversed time and screwed up Amazon's database. :-) -- RobHarwood

I don't know about the Jesus Seminar side of things, but Philip Toshio Sudo's Zen Computer is in the bibliography of ExtremeProgrammingExplained. He wrote ZenComputer? after ZenGuitar?.

Ah. This goes some way towards explaining things. Which section? I can't see it. Looking too hard probably. I wonder if Amazon realise just how interesting these sorts of correlations could be. -- Keith

I'm sure they do. They just don't have any business interest in collecting information about them. -- DanielKnapp

They may not actively collect those correlations, but they do utilise them. In the "My Recommendations" section, the books you get recommended are weighted by the number of stars and the "distance" from the books you've already indicated that you liked. Every so often, a more "distant" book is shown, indicating that Amazon is aware that these odd correlations can give some more business. (Personally, I would be very sad if Amazon went bust... I've never bought a book there in my life (if they want my business, they'll open an Australian shipping centre), but I find it a wonderful place to do research on books to buy) -- RobertWatkins.

I bought ZenGuitar? for my roommate last Christmas. It's not a bad book. -- SunirShah

My current favorite: Upon asking why Amazon believed I would rate The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing four and a half stars, I was amused to discover it was because I purchased Beer for Dummies and the 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide. -- PaulTevis

I wouldn't regard it as spooky, but do find it strangely humbling. I used to think my taste in music was weird - none of my friends had heard of the bands I liked. Then I found the SimilaritiesEngine? on the web (what a tragedy it was bought out) and was amazed that it basically listed (recommended) my entire record collection based on entering only five/ten favourite album titles: and I had thought my tastes were so different. Turns out there's lots of folks like me (well, who like the same kind of music). I used to think I was just plain weird until stumbling across PleaseUnderstandMe and realising that INTP's are quite 'rare', compared to other folks. So the internet is cool in that it lets us learn more about ourselves, our differences and feel better about ourselves. The computers that run Amazon etc. can use those similarities (in taste) to make profit, the companies are happy as are the people who get neat 'experiences'. The Amazon 'lists' are good ways of discovering new music/books. The stuff they do with zip codes and dot-com addresses (allowing you to spy on books people in different companies are reading) can be very interesting. I guess it's a little like the "any sufficiently advanced technology can seem like magic" quote. -- anon.