Abstract: A method of remote surveying to forecast popularity of a product or a media item comprises showing the item to a first, statistically significant and representative, sample of people, items of a closed catalog, obtaining a rating of each catalog item, and storing the ratings. Then a second, smaller, sample that is not representative of the population is shown the product or media item needing the forecast along with the items of the catalog. The people in the second sample rate the products or items in the same way and then a pseudo-distance is calculated between the catalog items and the product or media item. The pseudo-distance is applied to each person in the first sample to obtain a personal pseudo-rating for the product or media item. The personal pseudo-ratings provide a statistically significant electronic indicator of reactions to the product or media item.

Abstract: A system and method for estimating preferences or taste of users comprises a catalog having a closed number of items; a memory for storing distances between ratings of each pair of items; and a user interface to rate a subset of the items. The distances from the subset items to other items of the catalog give the user a preference for each item in the catalog despite never having rated these items. The catalog is ordered using the assigned preferences into a user preference vector, and is compared with vectors of other users to match up different users having similar preferences. Alternatively a distance measure can be defined between preferences of different users, with matching made between the users having the smallest difference. Initial distances may come from rating by a focus group or from application download data or other suitable sources.