Digg.com Announces Launch Of Recommendation Engine

There’s good news for Digg fans as the website has announced that the Digg Recommendation Engine will be launched this week.

Kevin Rose announced in the official Digg blog yesterday that a beta of the feature would be introduced this week. Anton Kast, lead scientist at Digg explained the engine in another blog post.

Anton said that while the front Digg page is filled with the most popular stories, many users are browsing and finding their stories in the Upcoming section, which garners over 15,000 stories every day. The recommendation engine is a way for users to filter through these thousands of stories, to get to the ones they like more quickly.

According to Kast’s blog, every time you Digg a story, the Engine matches you with other Diggers who Dugg the same story, and keeps track of the Diggs you have in common. When it’s time to calculate your Recommendations, the Engine draws from this pool of matched Diggers. For each matched Digger, it computes a correlation coefficient between you and them. It then picks a cutoff for this correlation coefficient, and the Diggers who make the cut are called Diggers Like You. Your recommendations are then quite simply articles that have proved popular among like-minded Diggers.

The Recommendation Engine will be presented to a random sample of registered Diggers so watch out for the red beta flag on your upcoming tab when you log on. Users that see this flag will have access to the Recommendation Engine. Digg hopes to roll the feature out to other users within the space of about a week or so.

To learn more about the Recommendation Engine click here.