Snooth’s wine recommendations now in Private Beta
By Vivek | June 5th, 2007 at 05:40 am ET
Snooth, which had raised seed funding for it’s wine recommendations platform couple of months back, has now launched private beta of the site. Snooth claims to “understand your personal taste in great detail and is enabled to recommend the wines that are best-suited to you”. As of now Snooth is indexing 1,408,993 Ratings and wants you to add 5 more ratings before you get started so that it’s recommendation engine can understand your tastes. Again more wines you taste better the engine understands you.
As you might expect, you can search for new wines to try, read reviews, and also if you think the price is right, purchase them through Snooth’s merchant partners. And to make your search easier, Snooth has a SnoothRank for wine that takes into account the wine’s reviews, the number of reviews, as well as how trusted each review is.
After all said and done, the biggest drawback at Snooth is that the engine takes “two hours” to refresh your recommendations. I can’t believe that. What kind of computation is taking place out there? I don’t want to write a post on scalability and responsiveness of apps, but this is just too much. Seems like they have sent instant gratification to vacation land without a recommended bottle of wine.
Links:
Snooth
on June 5th, 2007 at 9:32 am
Two corrections.
First, that’s a public beta. Anybody who wants one can go ask for an account (as of 19:00 EDT last night).
Second, two hours was an artificial limit (the frequency with which an updating pass that hadn’t seen real load was scheduled to run). I understand that’s 5 minutes at the moment, and I’m sure tuning will ensue.
I’m not technically affiliated with Snooth, I’m just friends with them.
on June 5th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Vivek
Sadly I’m not as fast off the mark as gr, but we read your comments and realized that 2 hours was unacceptable - the recommendations will now be calculated 5 minutes after the 5th review is posted. Hope that’s better…
We also moved (quietly) into open beta yesterday evening.
Thanks for your support
Philip
Snooth
on June 5th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Philip,
Thanks for the update. Although i don’t have much idea about wines but your recommendation system did not help me either since i put in my 5 ratings yesterday night, but until morning got no recommendations. I hope it is fixed by now.
on June 5th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Vivek
Youre one of the unfortunate few who has rated 5 wines, but there isnt enough overlap with other users yet to generate recommendations (thats why we say AT LEAST 5 wines). As more people sign up and the database becomes more interconnected this will occur less - either way, that doesn’t help you now.
We’re investigating some potential solutions.
Philip
on June 6th, 2007 at 10:36 am
[…] VÃa | StartupSquad Enlace | Snooth […]
on September 6th, 2007 at 10:52 am
[…] Snooth, the wine search and recommendation startup that I had written about earlier this year, seems to already have lot to offer to it’ users. After getting launched just couple of months back the startup is claiming that it now has ratings for 1.7 million listings. Considering the number is right, I wonder what is split between for editorial and user ratings for the total count. Anyway, one of the better developments on the site since the last time wrote is that now over 1,000 stores and wineries signed up, with over 200 currently live. What this means is you can buy wine from one of the 200 live stores and wineries online. […]
on November 27th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
[…] Snooth Wine Recommendations Now in Public Beta […]