Aside from normal developer information that we've got up at developer site we decided to put together a collection of our articles on our technology.

We'll continue collecting the more technical stuff from our blog here for the systems programmers and computer science wonks among you.

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Graph Database and Systems Stuff

  • On Building a Stupidly Fast Graph Database

    It’s pretty clear to computer science geeks that Directed Edge is supposed to be doing groovy things with graphs. In fact our recommendation engine, and some of the things that are unique about our approach to recommendations, are built on our super-fast graph database. When we went live yesterday with the latest version of our recommendations web services, another, much bigger thing happened behind the scenes for us: we cut over to the new version of our graph database. [...]

    With the latest version of our web services and database, we’ve gone from having a graph-store to having a proper graph database. We now use straight memory-mapped I/O, disk-based linear-hashing, have mechanisms to address data fragmentation, thread-safe read / write locking and logging / log replaying. [...]

Recommendations and Ranking

  • Introduction to Recommendations

    Collaborative filtering is the best known branch of recommender systems. In non-computer scientist terms it just means looking at histories of ratings, purchases and clicks and figuring out which products or users are similar to each other based on that. [...]

  • Search vs. Recommendations, or Authoritative and Related Sources in a Graph

    Search is about finding. You start with a topic you know exists and you want to find information about it. Recommendations are about discovering things you didn't know about.