Skip to content

Comment on How to Build a Popularity Algorithm You can be Proud of

Comments

Interesting overview, however he fails to address scalability issues properly. Some of the algorithms presented need to periodically recompute each item's score - this is a drawback if scalability is what you are looking for. A scalable algorithm will compute each score on write and will not require batch updates of previous items.

See: http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/overheard.html

After looking at a number of these algorithms, it seems like you really need to take each situation into consideration. I like that Google example as it is easy and scalable as you said. But for more complicated situations, you can do batch updates using Hadoop/MapReduce, assuming you don't have popular items that need to be calculated real-time.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.