A Book Like Foo is an book recommendation engine. It will discover books tailored to specific tastes and themes, selected from hundreds of thousands of titles. It learns over time, adapting to the changing tastes of readers through the years.
Often it will reveal unintuitive but accurate relationships between different books, without being limited by the assumptions we make about what people like.
Please start exploring! Check out some of our favourite queries:
Try searching for you own favourites and see what matches with your most-adored books.
Entering the literary void: Think of your favourite books (the more the better!) and input them into the search bar. The characteristics of each of these books, like their genre and time period, are used to create a query which is run against our database. This is where millions of relationships are found between almost half a million books. In simple terms, youâre entering a giant matchmaking network for books!
Path-finding your next binge read: The query travels through the database via the paths that link your chosen books together. It then discovers âco-affectionsâ â or similarites â that exist for your favourite books. From thousands of possibilities, it tells us which books are typically reviewed highly by readers that have also read your favourites.
Browse the shelves: The paths found reveal a range of titles from all genres, which are ranked by characteristics like general popularity, themes and authorship. In the end youâll find a specific order of results, with the first few being the most correlated with the books you put in at the start. Now all thatâs left to do is explore the shelves of your own virtual and bespoke bookshop!
These are more traditionally discovered book recommendations gathered from the same rich dataset. They're still based on statistical "collaborative" insight and will reflect titles that readers of these books will find equally enjoyable. Here's a selection to get you started on your path of discovery: