Recommendation Search Engines: Liveplasma.com

Elyse Sanchez, Tuesday, April 17, 2007 @ 9:51 am

Similar to Amazon’s suggestive selling, e.g., “people who bought X also bought Y,” these sites group recommendations around a target book, band, or film. Liveplasma.com bills itself as a “discovery engine,” providing searches in multiple languages (English, French and German) as well as multiple English-speaking cultures (US, Canada, UK). The three English-language searches yield identical results; the distinction lies in the localized Amazon site that presents products associated with the search results.

After entering search criteria, consisting of keyword(s), category (artist/band, movie, director or actor), and country, liveplasma presents a detailed and visually compelling graphical “galaxy” of related products. The music search displays linked spheres, whose size indicate the relative popularity of the band or artist. Colors of the spheres link related bands. Movie maps display miniature images of the movies along with the titles.

Although liveplasma maintains that “data is grouped according to interest, style, epoch and other criteria that suggest somebody will like it,” I found the movie search disappointing: I selected a favorite film of a specific genre, and was presented with a tightly-related cluster whose commonality was that these highly disparate films had the same director. Peripheral links were akin to a six-degrees of separation connection, with the outer rings of the galaxy presenting some truly farfetched choices. I was hoping for a more three-dimensional group of recommendations that would also take genre into account. Clearly, the database is not nearly as extensive as that of the interactive movie database (imdb.com). The music search, as well, grouped bands and artists in self-evident and obvious relationships. I would find it difficult to discover new things I would like using liveplasma.

Usability of the site is compromised by the existence of a fixed search box/menu/product display that obscures part of the left side of the display. Although the user can zoom in and out, reducing the entire map to bypass the left panel leaves the data too small to be readable.

Next, the family of gnod: "A search engine to find things you don't know about."

user experience design

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