Wednesday, July 26, 2006

better, smarter, faster

Since our very first days, recommendations have been a huge part of reddit. I still remember writing the first recommendation system that we launched while sitting on the couch with Steve. And even before that, Steve had experimented with other forms of filtering and recommending.

Thanks to Chris, the system I worked on has since been replaced several times over and I'm pleased to announce our newest system is live today. One major improvement is that it's faster than ever before -- it's practically live. Head to your recommended page and vote on something and the recommender should whisk it away and give you a new recommendation within seconds.

The technology we're trying out is new and unproven -- and we appreciate you bearing with us and helping us out as we've tried to get it tuned over the past couple of days. And, of course, we continue to want to hear your thoughts about how it's doing. But the most important contribution you can make is simply to vote on stories on your recommended page and teach reddit what you like.

We continue to work on new and smarter recommendation algorithms. Lately I've been working on smarter ways to find stories on blogs that might interest you. I've posted some of my early results but there's still plenty more work to be done. Thanks for sticking with us.

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

searching

We updated the search system this morning to help alleviate some load problems we've been experiencing. In addition to search being much more snappy, you may also use a url tag so search within urls. For example, the search phrase "reddit AND url:pcworld" will find links with reddit in the title and pcworld in the domain.

Please bear with us as we grow, speed is always a priority and we'll continue to do our best to keep things cruising.