I love Amazon’s personalization features, constantly offering up new products for me to check out, but occasionally its recommendations veer into the surreal.
Take, for example, this recent recommendation:
Nancy Drew: The Secret of Shadow Ranch was released just 4 days ago on July 16, 2004; We thought you’d be interested because you bought Diablo 2 Expansion: Lord of Destruction.
Amusing eh?
Now I’ll admit that during my grade school days I was a omnivorous consumer of adolecent mysteries, and after working my way through the conventional Hardy Boys and Three Investigators series, I did in fact snag a few of my sister’s Nancy Drew books. Hell, I even read the Bobsy Twins.
So with that in mind, I see a few possibilities:
- Amazon’s personalization engine so amazingly accurate that it picked up on my long-ago reading habits.
- Quite a few geek dads have been buying Nancy Drew novels for their daughters, thus skewing Amazon’s databases. Or, alternatively, are closet Nancy Drew readers themselves. Either way, it says something interesting about geek demographics.
- Amazon.com’s “what’s related” database is in need of a hard restart.
- Someone at Amazon.com has an extremely wicked sense of humor
We’ll probably never know the real answer, though I suspect #3 is the most likely suspect. That said, the world could use more stories about ass-kicking, smart, problem-solving women capable of taking down both conventional human villains as well as demonic badasses.