As part of my daily routine, I get a snapshot of all the latest, craziest news published on the web. Some are patently false, some are true and verified and some fall in between. Not obviously fake but then again, hard to believe if they are true. This article is one that falls in between: http://www.mainstreet.com/article/smart-spending/delete-cookies-save-cash
It speaks of the ability to get better online deals from e-commerce sites such as Expedia if you clear your cache and cookies such that the site can’t pull out your previous purchasing pattern. The logic is that the site is clever enough to verify that you are indeed a habitual e-commerce customer and set a higher price point for you. From a design standpoint, this is possible. In fact when I worked with Amazon in their early days as an advisor on data mining, the intent was similar. Develop algorithms and predictive models based on current or prior behaviour. That said, once the models were developed, it was hard to ensure service quality as running those modelling programs in the background took up a lot of resources and slowed the interaction down. Given that the power of computing has increased several fold since I was involved in this area, it is possible that these issues have been ironed out.
I am very keen to test out the truth of this and will probably spend a couple hours on it later. If it does work, then it will certainly help to determine how I plan to approach e-commerce sites in the very near future!
Tong Hsien-Hui
Some Meowsings...... 