File this one under General Stupidity

I wish there was a Technorati tag for that, anyway. While Ron's fixing his computer, it's up to me to do the heavy lifting, and there's a doozy of a completely stupid story hitting the news today. Apparently Wal-Mart's online shopping site had a bit of trouble with it's customer selection and suggestion "mapping" software this week.

Wal-Mart apologized yesterday after its retail Web site directed potential buyers of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "Planet of the Apes" DVDs to also consider purchasing DVDs with African American themes.

The world's largest retailer said in a statement that it was "heartsick" over the racially offensive grouping and that the site was linking "seemingly random combinations of titles."

When visitors to Walmart.com requested "Planet of the Apes: The Complete TV Series" on DVD, four other movies were recommended under the heading "Similar Items." Those films included "Martin Luther King: I Have A Dream/Assassination of MLK" and "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson."

That's a pretty big "oops" there. Now, I'm not familiar with the particular software used by Amazon, Wal-Mart and others which does the "suggest similar material" function, but I suppose this could easily have been an honest mistake. It depends on what the software uses to identify similar material. If it was simply a case of pre-set keyword matching, that would indicate a problem, since one could assume that they were linking the words "chocolate" and "apes" to African American themed work.

That's not very likely, though. Keyword searching would be highly suspect and produce a lot of bad hits. Two other scenarios are far more likely. One, similar to the system used by NetFlix, is a rating and purchase pattern. Customers are able to provide scaled feedback about a given film and their purchase/rental history is recorded. If a lot of customers rent and give a high rating to one particular film, and that same set showed a high percentage renting and similarly approving of some other set of films, those would be suggested to the shopper regardless of the theme or title text. (For example, if you give a five star review to The Sopranos, you will very likely have "Six Feet Under" suggested for you, even though the themes are quite different.)

A more simple system might simply have each DVD entered with a set of search facets. These could break the films down by genre (e.g. drama, comedy, thriller, documentary) by actors, by director, by rating, or a host of other search parameters. Then the software would take the item you just requested and match it with other selections which have been popular titles that have the most search facets in common. I can't really imagine what criteria from those films might be the same, but I suppose it's possible. Far more likely is that some of the films were incorrectly tagged with their search terms when entered into the system. Whether that was done intentionally as a very poor taste prank or as an accidental clerical error may come to light later.

In any event, Wal-Mart is moving quickly to set matters to rights, and it doesn't look like anything to get too upset over yet. If it was intentional, I'm betting the culprit will be identified and actions taken against them.