Baidu Buys Recommendation Engine to Add Personal Flavor to Video Service

Baidu, according to local portal Sohu, stealthily bought a newly-founded video recommendation engine dubbed JinWanKanSha (means what to watch tonight? in English) last week in an effort to ramp up its video search business. The service would be integrated into Baidu’s vertical search division.

Launched in the middle of this year, JinWanKanSha is a dedicated service that offers up  movie/TV drama recommendations after someone ticking up 8 movies/TV shows they favored on the website (pictured below). Ideally, the more the service knew about your tastes, the more accurate it could be in figuring out what movies you might take a like to.

Recommendation based on personal flavors/user behaviors has been gaining in popularity among startups since two years ago, but we haven’t see anything particular interesting or any acquisitions in the field yet till this one.

Some services, like Wumii or Youjian, is recommending articles based people’s reading history, they hadn’t see very high adoption among users.

Actually, Baidu already had similar offerings on its video search vertical before the talent-buyout. Baidu’s resembler, requires 3 (minimum) or more ticks to generate a personalized video list for you. As for the accuracy, not so much at the very least to me. After a bit playing around, it seems that Baidu employed movie attributes like “genre, director and leading roles” to recommend similar titles to you.

Unconfirmed rumors put it that Baidu is ramping up personalized features across a wide range of services including Baidu News, Baidu Video.