i'm sure hoping it was accidental...BUT STILL


Wal-Mart ends automated movie suggestions
By Marcus Kabel, Associated Press
Wal-Mart Stores is shutting down the automated system that creates movie recommendations on its shopping website after the system randomly linked a Planet of the Apes DVD to films about African-Americans including Martin Luther King Jr., the company said Thursday.
Wal-Mart said it had fixed the immediate problem by removing what it called the "offensive combinations" from a webpage on www.walmart.com advertising a boxed DVD set, Planet Of The Apes: The Complete TV Series.

Under "Similar Items," the page linked shoppers to four movies about the lives of the slain civil-rights leader, actress Dorothy Dandridge, boxer Jack Johnson and singer Tina Turner. It was manually changed by 5:30 p.m. CT to link shoppers instead to DVD sets of Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond and Star Wars.

But the world's largest retailer said the automated system that generates links for shoppers from one movie to others of similar interest is malfunctioning and is in the process of being shut down. All cross references would be removed as soon as technically possible until the system can be fixed, Wal-Mart said.

"We are heartsick that this happened and are currently doing everything possible to correct the problem," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams said in a statement.

Wal-Mart moved swiftly after a link to the page for Planet of the Apes began circulating by e-mail on the Internet.

"Walmart.com's item mapping process does not work correctly and at this point is mapping seemingly random combinations of titles. We were horrified to discover that some hurtful and offensive combinations are being mapped together," Williams said.

"We are deeply sorry that this happened," she added.

Williams said the malfunctioning system had to be shut down because it could potentially create an almost endless number of possible combinations between the thousands of movies available on the website.

"To further illustrate the bizarre nature of this technical issue, the site is also mapping movies such as Home Alone and Power Puff Girls to African-American themed DVDs," Williams said.

A non-African American themed documentary about surfers, Riding Giants, links to the same list of seemingly unrelated fantasy films that the King biopic does, including Polar Express and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.


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Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

although most likely it wasn't intentional, money is green and thats all their worried about. pity.

Whoa

This is why I don't trust uninformed recommendations. It kind of reminds me of the MS Word spell check controversy recently.

On a related note, my girlfriend's work publishes a book called "A Child's Life" by Phoebe Gloeckner It's in the vein of R Crumb, a comic book representation of her childhood, including graphic drawings of her being molested and other sex acts.

I've seen this book in the children's section of more than one bookstore.

I never take any notice to those "recommendations" because they're always fucked up for one reason or another. It doesn't matter what retailer's site I go to.