1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer-based systems for providing recommendations. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus that facilitate providing and obtaining recommendations from trusted sources.
2. Related Art
One of the great advantages of the Internet is that it enables a large community of users to provide and obtain recommendations from each other. These recommendations can cover items as diverse as web sites, hotels, movies, books, and in general most types of products and services. In fact, many popular web sites, such as Eopinions or CNET, are primarily devoted to facilitating dissemination of such recommendations.
Users generally find recommendations provided by a large group of users to be useful in making decisions about specific items. However, recommendations for some items, such as books or movies, are highly subjective. Some users may like a particular book while other users do not. For these types of “subjective” items, it is important to be able to “trust” the source of the recommendations. For example, a user may trust a recommendation provided by his brother-in-law about a movie because the user has similar tastes in movies to his brother-in-law, whereas the user may place less trust in recommendations for the movie provided by the general public.
Unfortunately, the extent to which a user trusts another user to make recommendations is itself highly subjective. It is consequently hard to incorporate such trust information into systems which provide recommendations.