Two weeks ago one of my co-workers (HN name: coreyloose) participated in build madison (
http://http://www.buildmadison.org/) a hackathon in Madison, WI. For our project we built Brainsy (
http://brainsy.net), a visual suggestion engine for etsy.com products. We won the cash prize and a years free hosting. This past weekend we pushed out version 2.
We wanted to share our work with HN. The algorithm is pretty simple now. It looks at the list of tags for the products that you like, and searches for products with similar tags. It's not perfect but works pretty well givent its simplicity.
We would love to get HN's feedback on the design, possible improvements for the algorithm (or any good reading I could do on the subject), and thoughts for monitization. We never really intended for the project to make any money, so we're pretty happy just making something that's useful. Corey is trying to get a job at etsy, so he figured this would be a good project to help out with that. But if you have any good ideas for how to monitize that would be an added bonus!
