Google and Microsoft should steal the idea.
By Farhad ManjooPosted Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2009, at 5:37 PM ET
It's no surprise that Netflix has launched another contest to improve its movie-recommendations system—the $1 million the company gave away for the first Netflix Prize was the steal of the century. On Monday, three years after the contest kicked off, Netflix awarded the jackpot to BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, a team of seven engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists who managed to improve the DVD-rental service's recommendations by 10 percent. BellKor beat out another team—the Ensemble, with more than 30 members—that had achieved the exact same ratings improvement but lost by turning in its method 20 minutes after BellKor.
Click here for more.