Absolutely No Machete Juggling

I’m a big user of Google Reader, so it annoyed me a bit when I started seeing things like “50 people liked this” and similar features peppering my Reader interface a while back. I wasn’t alone, there’s a Google Groups thread where a number of people lament the inability to deactivate this “feature.”

But a few days ago, I saw the payoff: Google Reader Recommendations. Recommendation engines are one of my favorite things about the new social web – Amazon’s book recommendations and Netflix’s movie recommendations have led me to find things I never would have discovered on my own. So when I saw that Google Reader had recommendations of other blogs or RSS feeds for me, I was excited.

I figured, like most other recommendation engines, Google Reader now looked at what feeds I subscribe to and found other feeds that were subscribed to by people who subscribed to the feeds I like. This is generally how recommendation engines work: if I love “Back to the Future” and 90% of Netflix users who rate that movie highly also highly rate “Ghostbusters” highly and I’ve never seen it, Netflix will recommend Ghostbusters to me.

But when I looked at my recommendations, a strange thing caught my attention.

There is a recommendation for a blog related to TeX in there. If I scroll down, there are actually five or six other TeX resources.

This stood out because I don’t subscribe to ANY RSS feeds that related to TeX in any way, not even tangentially. So why did Google so strongly suggest them?

Well, I don’t subscribe to TeX feeds, but I am working on my Master’s thesis, and I’ve had to do a lot of Googling for help on LaTeX. A very large portion of searches I do in Google are LaTeX related, simply because I often need to troubleshoot a problem or look up how to format something.

So Google Reader’s recommendations are not merely based on feeds. They are based in my search results as well, even though that’s “separate” from Reader. It wouldn’t surprise me if people were getting recommendations based on the content of their Gmail accounts either.

Creepy.