The Wikipedia page is pretty decent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize The class of algorithms that it's d

The Wikipedia page is pretty decent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize The class of algorithms that it's dealing with is called collaborative filtering and the Bell Labs team has done some impressive stuff there. The contest is more academic than it would seem on the surface, since as was mentioned in a recently posted article, the data set is rather narrow in scope. In other words, it's more of a collaborative filtering algorithms contest than a "find the best recommendation algorithm" contest.