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Since we are sharing anecdotes, I can report it's been 20 years of buying stuff on the internet and the combined billions of ad tracking research dollars spent
by stefan_ 7y ago
Since we are sharing anecdotes, I can report it's been 20 years of buying stuff on the internet and the combined billions of ad tracking research dollars spent by Amazon and Google have not yet come up with a better algorithm than to bombard me with ads for the exact same thing I just bought.
- propogandist 7y agoThis can happen when a retargeting campaign doesn't have a 'burn pixel' or conversion event trigger. It's a common oversight, which can cause a re-targeting program to kick-off unnecessarily (or cause ads that have followed you around to become obvious)
- idoh 7y agoThe AI innovation must be that they can figure out which marketers are likely to forget to have a burn pixel because those marketers drive more revenue.
- scottlocklin 7y agoYou'd think with all the "AI" out there, they could match a sales DB entry with the CRM DB entry, but, in fact, they basically can't.
- hnick 7y agoAnd yet I haven't seen one ad that has a 'not interested' feature similar to YouTube. I mean, if I could stop seeing washing machines or whatever, I'd probably click it.
- propogandist 7y agodo you clear your cookies and html5 storage? That should wipe any personalization that's happening, but the ads will become very generic then. You can also block ads (Ublock/Umatrix)
- hnick 7y agoOh yeah I can do that, I'm just wondering why they're not too interested in direct user feedback from my end. Surely it would be useful to adjust their algos.
- Enginerrrd 7y agoRight? Recommenders are almost counter productive for me in most cases. I want a recommender to remain broad, not give me increasingly niche recommendations a la youtube. About the only halfway decent recommender system I've interacted with is the various forms of curated lists on Spotify. They seem to actually take a decent stab at it with related but sufficiently different and interesting content. For all Facebook knows about me they've always been exceptionally bad at advertising to me, which is remarkable considering what they've got. Google is only very marginally better. Actually, now that I think about it, Amazon's 'customer's also bought' is also pretty bad at the recommendation itself since it not uncommonly recommends incompatible things! ...but it does often succeed at getting me to think more about what else I might need and sometimes leads me to buying other things. At least it's not always recommending the same thing, but rather related things, which is probably a much better way to advertise.
- nradov 7y agoLikewise Pandora does a decent job of picking songs for me based on what I previously liked. It's not perfect but far better than random.
- _blu 7y agoit's easier to recomment things you probably like than things they want you to like/may like
- mojuba 7y ago> For all Facebook knows about me they've always been exceptionally bad at advertising to me Because it's not Facebook really, it's the advertisers who choose targeting criteria. You as an advertiser have a myriad of options. For example if you've built a competitor to X, you can target users who've visited X recently, aged N-M, residing in countries A, B and C, and so on. There are options with broader interests too. Poorly targeted ad means poorly selected criteria by the advertiser (or sometimes just advertiser experimenting) and consequently money wasted. Facebook doesn't care though. Then there is retargeting/remarketing (target bounced traffic) already mentioned here is probably the stupidest looking invention that actually works.
- scarejunba 7y agoThat's because: * They don't have suppression set up * They're using a conversion tracking platform that is slow * They're testing the returns conversion hypothesis: you have expressed concrete intent, you have bought the product. If it has 5% return rate, you probably still want it, and there's a 5% chance they need to be in the mix.
- andybak 7y agoI just spent 15m on Amazon trying to prod the recommendation algorithm into finding something I actually wanted to buy so I could get above the "free delivery threshold". Think about that. I wanted to spend money. I wasn't too fussy what it was. Amazon has a decade of my purchasing and browsing history. And they still failed.
- ffe44 7y agoHa. Last time I wanted to buy something on Amazon, their search page kept freezing every time I load it: 100% CPU load. Because I really wanted to buy that thing, I spent 30 mins debugging their silly scripts and found one for-loop that tries to find a non-existent element. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out a way to enable my fix in a minified script, as reloading the page kept loading the original script.
- edoloughlin 7y agoPut a breakpoint on the offending line, manually add the element when it breaks, hit resume and hope for the best?
- mcdevilkiller 7y agoWhit uMatrix, you could have created a rule to block that script.
- giardini 7y agoTurn off Javascript - Amazon still works OK.
- Jestar342 7y agoAmazon infuriates me. I regularly buy gadget-y bits like electronic components and peripherals. Probably at least once a month. Never see adverts for similar. That ONE TIME I buy a unicorn dress for my 2 year old daughter? That's a lifetime of unicorn related merchandise adverts and recommendations for you!
- radarsat1 7y ago
- corodra 7y agoHey, personal experience and to be fair for them, Google does occasionally give me ads about a Haas CNC machine. I really want one. But I don't have the disposable $100k for one and I don't have the space... nor do I have 3 phase power. But I do want one and haven't bought one. So, good on them, right?
- democracy 7y agoThe marketing budgets are there to be spent :)
- mathattack 7y agoYes - just in case you want two or stopped the purchase along the way.
- ineedasername 7y agoSometimes it also recommends other brands of the thing I just bought. Like a cell phone: I didn't buy Samsung, but now I see their ads. I guess that is a very very small improvement- Maybe I'm the type of consumer who gets a new phone every week?
- Tomte 7y agoNo, but you might be unhappy with your phone, return it and buy a new one.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoI have been looking for a shelf that’s as close to 50” wide and 10” deep as possible. No search on any site that allows you to search for such a thing as far as I can tell.
- meej 7y agoYou can do this at wayfair.com. It's kind of hidden though, when you get to the shelves, click "Sort & Filter" and then scroll down until you see the dimension sliders.
- m463 7y agoI think amazon works pretty well. They show me similar things to the thing I just put in my cart. Sometimes better choices that I made. They also show related things that other people have bought, that many times I end up purchasing.
- angstrom 7y agoDirty secret: "The customers who bought also bought" algorithm doesn't require ML/AI. You can accomplish that with relational algebra on a precomputed data warehouse job and only for products with strong correlation. The intelligence of the customers is enough agency to instil a semblance of intelligence in the data.
- aserafini 7y agoYes, this is the straightforward ‘collaborative filtering’ algorithm. I suppose the line between ‘algorithm’ and AI/ML is not well defined though. At what point does a technique become ‘AI’? I don’t know a good answer.
- antod 7y agoAs an utterly cynical layperson, algorithm means directly querying data. AI means feeding systems with training data and sprinkling them with magic obfuscation dust.
- m463 7y agoI wonder if the dirty secret for lots of stuff is: "They aren't using AI anywhere"
- angstrom 7y agoWell, for problems that are simply looking for a ranked relationship if you have human input it could be used to train a ML that attempts to look for similar correlations...or you could just use your human mechanical turks that are already informing you. ML problems that are good are the ones not trying to approximate reality like CWBAB. I'm doubtful we'll see an ai that makes a serious jump without directly interacting with the world we live in. Under that measure cars might be the closest since you learn to interact with the bounds of where it can and can't go is similar to a toddler learning to crawl.
- alpaca128 7y agoNot to mention these systems are also completely useless at recognizing one product someone bought already includes the product they're recommending. When you buy Dark Souls 2 with all DLCs you can be sure Steam will suggest Dark Souls 2 without any DLCs to you for at least a full year.
- eitland 7y agoYou are luckier than me: I've spent 10 years bombarded with ads for things I never bought, never wanted to buy and that are directly insulting at this point. (Buying something would maybe give me a two day break though.)