Why Newspapers Need to Heed Facebook, Now

Guest author Chris Treadaway (@ctreada) is founder and CEO of Lasso, and author of the upcoming book Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day, an imprint of Sybex. He blogs at treadaway.typepad.com.

Facebook's rise to dominance has been astounding. It is currently the most visited site in the United States, and boasts 400-plus million worldwide users. We've seen it go from a dorm room distraction to now being larger than the combined population of the United States and Mexico. With the social network claiming that roughly 70% of its user base is outside the United States, that means that there are at least 120 million Americans on Facebook today.

Personalized News Recommendation Based on Click Behavior

Personalized News Recommendation Based on Click Behavior

Abstract

Online news reading has become very popular as the web provides access to news articles from millions of sources around the world. A key challenge of news service website is help users to find news articles that are interesting to read. In this paper, we present our research on developing personalized news recommendation system in Google News. The recommendation system builds profiles of user’s news interests based on user’s click behavior on the website. To understand the news interest change over time, we first conducted a large-scale log analysis of the click behavior of Google News users. Based on the log analysis, we developed a Bayesian framework for predict user’s current news interests, which considers both the activities of that particular user and the news trend demonstrated in activities of a group of users. We combine the information filtering mechanism using learned user profile with an existing collaborative filtering mechanism to generate personalized news recommendation. The combined method was deployed in Google News. Experiments on the live traffic of Google News website demonstrated that the combined method improves the quality of news recommendation and attracts more frequent visit to the website.


Citation: Personalized News Recommendation Based on Click Behavior, Jiahui Liu, Elin Pedersen, Peter Dolan, 2010 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces.

See also other publications by Googlers.

©2010 Google