August 2007
Beginner to intermediate
362 pages
10h 11m
English
Content preview from Programming Collective IntelligenceBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 1. 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 ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.