More Info

About the Similarities Engine and its author.

Overview

The Similarities Engine (SE) is a free music recommending system: pick five albums you love, and it finds listeners whose taste overlaps with yours and recommends the records they loved too. It uses no genres, tags, audio analysis, or AI model of what music is, only the accumulated pattern of which records keep showing up together in real people's lists of favorites. The method was first built as a DOS application in the early 1990s, served users by email through the late 1990s, and was granted US Patent 5,749,081 (1998, later cited by IBM, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Sony). What's live today is a faithful re-implementation of that original engine, running on modern serverless infrastructure and querying the original hand-grown data.

QR code that opens the Similarities Engine home page — Point a phone camera at this and it opens SE. Handy for passing it along to someone standing next to you, with nothing to type and nothing to spell out.

About the Author

David E. Whiteis is a computer systems engineer and serial inventor with a long history of throwing interesting technology pasta at the Internet wall and seeing what sticks. You can reach him by filling out the contact form here.

How It Works

Details on the technology behind SE, including the old and new versions, can be found here.

Used Record Stores

Some used record stores display a 4x5 inch Similarities Engine card, with a QR code on it, so customers can scan it and bring up the site on their phone, anyone can do it easily. Then the customers can name their five and go dig for what comes back, while they are still in the shop, which drives sales. The list of stores is here at Best Used Record Stores in the World. If you run a shop and want a card, there is no charge and nothing to install.