Patent ID: 8589244

Claim:
A method of sending a recommendation to a customer's terminal device, comprising the steps of: based on on-line activities of a group of users, creating pairs of identifiers, wherein each pair contains a first identifier for an item acquired by a user and a second identifier for an item also acquired by that user; tallying entries for unique pairings of identifiers to obtain respective counts for unique pairings of identifiers; assigning weights to the counts such that the highest counted pairs for each first identifier have equal weight, and for each first identifier each pair having a successively lower count has a successively lower weight; extracting unique pairings and their respective weighted counts that contain first identifiers present in a list of identifiers derived from a customer's on-line activities; compiling via a computer the unique second identifiers in the extracted unique pairings and summing the weighted counts of each instance of a unique second identifier from the extracted unique pairings to form a recommendations list based at least in part on the respective summed weighted counts; and transmitting a message containing information derived from identifiers in the recommendations list, from the computer through a communication network to the customer's terminal device, to enable the terminal device to present the information as the recommendation to the customer.