More Like This

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The stories listed under the "More Like This" section, how are they chosen? (Drove my parents nuts always asking for explanations!) I've seen a couple that the recommended stories were not anywhere close to the story chapter they were appended to.

Comments

Search algorithm

erin's picture

The "similarity" is based on categories, titles and content. We can weight those a bit differently but we really don't have fine control of the whole thing.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

For Example

Daphne Xu's picture

The display of this post at this particular instance displayed the following five posts as "more like this":

  • Why can't more people be like this?
  • the "more like this" function
  • A Black Friday LOL or more like a ROFL.
  • Like a Phoenix from the ashes- More Better Wishful Thinking
  • Why Can't a Boy be More Like a Girl? Part 4

The top two contained all three words of the subject: more, like, and this. The bottom three contained the words more and like.

It's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to devise a computer algorithm to match humans' views on what's similar and what's not. More often than not, the searches fail miserably. At one point, a display of one of my short stories produced the first five postings of my one very long story -- rather unhelpful, to say the least. (One of those postings would suffice, along with other different posts.)

-- Daphne Xu