LibraryThing’s UnSuggest: Discover Your Dislikes
A post from the founder of LibraryThing on the tech blog Mashable caught my eye this morning. LibraryThing has a new couple of new search features that seem promising so I thought I’d have a look.
I use LibraryThing to grab book covers for display on my blog, but I’ve never really tinkered with the site too much. However the new feature “UnSuggester” sounded interesting.
But let’s start with LibraryThing’s “BookSuggester.” LibraryThing claims to have 7.1 million books and over 9.5 million user generated tags in its database. The new BookSuggester feature combs through those books and tags to find things you might like, based on the title of a book you know you like.
The obvious question is why use this over Amazon’s recommended books feature? Well for one thing, Amazon’s results are included so you get those plus more. LibraryThing also offers more results and separates them into tag-based results and actual humans-have-read-and-liked results.
At the top of each results page there’s an intriguing link for LibraryThing’s other new search feature, called “UnSuggest” which offers “bad” recommendations.
UnSuggester is a recommendation engine turned on its head. Instead of telling you what you’d like based on what you already like, UnSuggester tells you what you wouldn’t like based on what you like.
At first I thought it was a kind of funny, one-off feature that you play with for half an hour and forget about. After all, I don’t need a search engine to tell me that a love of Immanuel Kant probably precludes a deep affinity for Confessions of a Shopaholic.
But then I started thinking about something Robert Anton Wilson writes about a lot: expanding your reality tunnel.
Based on the Unsuggester search results you can force expose yourself to other things that might otherwise pass quietly by you. The potential for new discoveries is actually much greater with negative suggestions than it ever will be with those that cater to your mold.
With the tunnel narrowing features like selective RSS news feeds and niche base social networks popping up everyday, it’s become relatively easy to hear only what you already know you want to hear. UnSuggester can be refreshing chance to expose yourself to books outside your usual preference. And who knows, maybe I would like Confessions of a Shopaholic.
