Re:recommendations, circa 1999 (Score 1)

I have an example of prior art here. There was a company called Trivida in southern California whose software did EXACTLY what this patent is claiming. It was bought by a company called Be Free and they renamed the product BSELECT. It was in use for a time between 1999-2004 by a number of medium sized web sites. Eventually, it was shelved because of lack of demand.

You can look at a press release about version 3.0 of this product (from 2002) here.