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Difference between a search engine's relevance rankings and a recommender system

What's the difference between a search engine's relevance rankings and a recommender system?

Don't both try and achieve the same purpose, i.e. finding the most relevant items for the user?

Solution

  • There is a major difference between a search engine and a recommender system:

    1. In a search engine, the user knows what he is looking for, and he makes the query ! For instance, I might wonder if I should go to see a movie, and search information about it, like actors and directors.
    2. In a recommender system, the user isn't supposed to know what we are recommending to her. We match her tastes with neighbours or whatever algorithm you like, and find things that she would't have looked after, like a new movie!

    One is more about information retrieval, while the other is more about information filtering and discovery.