Abstract: Methods, apparatuses, and computer program products are described herein. One example embodiment may include a method for providing a hybrid ranked list of items to a user device including receiving at least one of criteria input or an input weight, receiving an indication of peer recommendation of the one or more items correlated to the at least one of the criteria input or the input weight, correlating the at least one of the criteria input or the input weight to one or more normalized values, determining the one or more items according to a weighted value, receiving the one or more items determined based on the one or more normalized values, generating the hybrid ranked list of items, and providing, to the user device, the hybrid ranked list of items including the one or more items correlated to the at least one of the criteria input or the input weight.

Abstract: Methods, apparatuses, and computer program products are described herein that are configured for creating a hybrid recommendation algorithm that programmatically decreases the importance of the content-based data as the basis of affinity data supporting collaborative filtering grows over time. One example embodiment may include a method for computing a content based similarity metric between a first item and a second item, accessing each of one or more instances of affinity data; and calculating an overall similarity metric between the first item and the second item, the overall similarity metric being a function of the content based similarity metric between the first item and the second item and a number of instances of empirical data for the items, the function defined such that as the number of instances of empirical data increases, the overall similarity metric increases a relative contribution in favor of the empirical data.

Abstract: Methods, apparatuses, and computer program products are described herein that are configured to programmatically synthesize multiple five different sources of data bearing on user preferences for providing a recommendation of an item in response to a recommendation request. One example embodiment may include a method for receiving a recommendation request, providing a search result, the search results generated by querying a set of (target user, affinity) pairs for items matching the search terms and sorting the matching items according to a combination of the affinities and a strength of text matching.