Recommendations engine coming?

Using Ghost
1

I see in the latest Github commits that Ghost is working towards adding a recommendations engine, which is good to see, given that it has worked at Substack. I hope it is cross-network, so we get out of these walled gardens of contents across Ghost/Substack/etc, so we’ll see what happens.

## Commit

Added a random order and a limit of 5 to the Recommendations modal
- recommendations are rendered in a random order, using 
Fisher-Yates shuffle 
- only 5 recommendations are rendered by default, the other ones are 
hidden behind a "Show all" button 
- recommendations are fetched all at once from the backend, as we 
assume there wont be more than 100-ish recommendations per publication
1 Like
2

I’m moving this to a different category, as it’s phrased not about an idea to vote on, but is discussing a feature already being developed.

3

It appears that is is a way for site owners to recommend other sites to members. The text on the recommendations page will say:

Here are a few other sites ${title} thinks you may enjoy.

The commit being discussed is here:

4

My guess is is that this related to the Ghost Explore integration which already exists in Ghost.

If you haven’t checked it out, you can visit here and click “Add your site”:

The Ghost Explore site will integrate with a Ghost instance and with your performance pull over your subscriber count and other details.

So the Ghost Foundation already has this database of many Ghost sites, including what category they are in, how much revenue they generate and how many subscribers they have.

The recommendation engine could then find other sites in the same category as yours.

Just guessing! I’m not sure how else Ghost would find other Ghost sites to recommend.

1 Like
5

This would be a really powerful feature. As you note, a lot of this is already captured for Ghost Explore and having it as a card or feature you could enable on posts would be great.

2 Likes
6

Here’s what seems to happening in the source code:

In the admin area, you’ll be able to recommend sites to your readers. They could be other Ghost sites, but they don’t have to be.

A title, excerpt, image, and fav icon will be pulled in. If the external site is a Ghost site, the feature could support “one click subscribe”.

It seems you’ll also be able to see a report of Ghost sites that are recommending your site. You might also be able to see the number of clicks and subscribers that have arrived through each recommendation.

Seems like an interesting tool to help Ghost blogs cross-promote each other.

1 Like
7

This is now out in Beta :)

2 Likes