Can Anyone Explain This?

I’ve been using Outbrain on my blog for a few weeks and I’ve been generally very happy with it. It is well integrated, visually attractive, and provides a real value in the ability to see reader’s ratings of my posts. It also usually does a pretty good job at making recommendations, but as I was replying to a comment on a post about the iPhone, I noticed the following recommendations.

 

WTF? Real Muscle Online? I’m not sure I get how that is likely to apply...

Comments

[Nathan D]

Sounds like someone read the "How to Game Outbrain for Fun and Profit" pamphlet.

[Trevor]

Sounds like the recommendation engine has found all those old photos you've been tagged in on Facebook. Powerful stuff.

[Charles Teague]

I can't even think of anything funny to say about this. sad.

[Kate]

Hi Charles,

My name is Kate and I'm the account manager at outbrain. I'm sorry you got that clearly bad recommendation on your post - I agree that it is a totally illogical link. We try very hard to make sure that the quality of our recommendations is high. I've marked that particular post so that it does not show up again.

Although the quaility of our recommended links is our top priority sometimes one will slip by that doesn't work. For this we have recently released a solution that will allow the blogger to "zap" links off their site if they don't like them.

All you need to do is be signed in to outbrain. You can see more about this feature on our blogpost at the link below.

http://blog.outbrain.com/2008/12/if-luke-skywalker-blogged-he-would-want-this-1.html

Again, I apologize for the ridiculous recommendation. We will take a look at what in the algorithm could have caused it.

Thanks,
Kate
The outbrain team

[Charles Teague]

Hey Kate,

Thanks for the comment- more than anything I found it a bit humorous, but I'm happy to hear about the 'zap' feature. Very cool.

-charles