Google Adds Protein to Its Recommendations

December 28, 2011

Here goes Google, buying rather than innovating. Again. CNET News reports, “Google Gobbles up Restaurant Recommendation App Alfred.” Created by Clever Sense, Alfred was released for the iPhone in July. Google has now released a free version for Android.

The app studies the user’s restaurant choices, then uses online reviews and “other analysis” to recommend similar locations. There’s a cute minute-long video from Clever Sense here. Writer Jay Greene clarifies what makes Alfred special:

“Unlike better-known and more widely used rivals such as Yelp and Urbanspoon, Clever Sense uses artificial intelligence to find customers with similar tastes, then offers recommendations based on their dining choices.

It’s the kind of service–one that relies on complex algorithms to arrive at relevant results–that is right up Google’s alley.

Indeed. And if Google didn’t have to bother developing the software, all the better.

Clever Sense was founded by tech highbrows Babak Pahlavan and Nima Asgharbeygi. The Clever Sense Platform that powers Alfred combines two engines. The Extraction Engine curates unstructured crawled data; from there, it extracts concepts and learns similarities. The Serendipity Engine, though, is at the core; it is the part that learns user preferences. The company assures us that the data used to draw these conclusions is stored securely.

Cynthia Murrell, December 28, 2011

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.