Dave Viner's Weblog

Long Tail and mental costs

VentureBlog: Of Searches and Psychics: The Costs of Long Tail Businesses is a facinating entry. I think it nicely captures one of the biggest challenges when trying to do the "long tail" thing... namely search. If Amazon only offered browsing for books, but no searching, I would rarely use it. Search is the key to finding the right nugget in the giant haystack of the long tail.

I would extend the argument to say that, beyond simple searching, "related" data is the next most important thing. If a long tail service provider can find a particular piece of data or item, I think the next value to be added is the relationship of that thing to other similar things.

And relationships extend along a couple of axes: raw similarity of item (bolle sunglasses are like rayban sunglasses), affinity groups from user behaviors (other people who bought bolle sunglasses also bought columbia ski jackets and panama jack suntan lotion), and finally user-implied similarity (you normally take these kinds of actions which means you are probably interested in these sorts of things)...

cool stuff.