TripAdvisor to Personalize Data for Travelers
Azer Bestavros, Institute Founding Director and professor of computer science, was quoted in a Boston Globe article discussing TripAdvisor’s decision to personalize travel recommendations for its users:
Amazon Inc. pioneered personalized searches more than a decade ago, and now “it’s hard to find a website that doesn’t do it,” said Azer Bestavros, director of the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering at Boston University.
Bestavros said TripAdvisor probably spent a lot of time trying to understand the context of each click users made, and how to use that information to improve browsing and search results.
“It’s a big undertaking because of the market research they would have to do,” Bestavros said. “What is the impact on how people use the site?”