r3fresh

r3fresh and Outbrain: We’re All Good

This post is an update to a previous post about Outbrain’s recommendation system.

Previously, I had come to the conclusion that Outbrain had been (unknowingly) selling links in their recommendation widget. After talking to the Outbrain guys, this is (fortunately) false. The Outbrain widget is the first recommendation widget of it’s kind and goes against most web 2.0 practices. The recommendations widget finds the best posts on the entire Internet and puts them on your site. With alternative recommendation engines you would only have recommended posts from users using the same service, which may lower the quality of recommendations on your site.

Outbrain is the first web company that isn’t greedy with their service. They don’t have any advertising in their widget, anyone can use the service, and recommendations come from everywhere, not just from bloggers using the widget.

After this experience I wanted to publicly apologize for my outburst towards Outbrain. I should have contacted them before posting anything on the Internet. Outbrain is different and every blogger should give their service a try.

Vist Outbrain

Picture by Macwagen