Patent ID: 8301623

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of selecting items to recommend, the method comprising: generating a ranked set of candidate items to recommend to a target user based at least partly on item selection actions performed by the target user, the ranked set of candidate items comprising candidate items and associated rankings of the candidate items; subsequent to said generating, probabilistically varying the rankings of at least some of the candidate items in the ranked set of candidate items automatically by a computer to generate a probabilistically-varied ranked set of candidate items, said probabilistically varying the rankings comprising using a pseudo-random number generator to vary the rankings by an amount that is based at least in part on a number of the item selection actions performed by the target user; selecting, from said probabilistically-varied ranked set, a first subset of the candidate items to present to the target user; and subsequent to said selecting, repeating at least said probabilistically varying the rankings and said selecting to thereby select a second subset of the candidate items to present to the target user, wherein the second subset of the candidate items comprises one or more items that are not members of the first subset of the candidate items.