Maybe you’re rather make your own ecommerce product recommendations. Personalization engine Qubit is on the case, with a new system that bases its recommendations on “deep learning”, which they assure us is much, much better than mere “machine learning”. No word on whether there’s a dial that goes to 11.
Content recommendation vendor Taboola has purchased ecommerce product recommendation vendor Connexity (formerly Shopzilla) for around $800 million. Both firms embed their suggestions in publisher websites. You may recall that Taboola went public via a SPAC a few weeks ago.
Here’s a sign of the times: Salesforce has confirmed it is no longer selling its Audience Studio DMP, which started as its $700 million Krux acquisition in 2016. Current users will be supported but the company expects third-party audiences to be loaded into its CDP in the future, and first-party audiences to be pushed to Facebook, Google, Amazon and other closed ad platforms via Advertising Studio.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.