Data Structures and Algorithms in Java A Project-Based Approach

Pinterest is a social media platform that allows users to assemble images or other media into customized lists, then share those lists with others. Pinterest calls these lists “pinboards” and the items added to each board “pins,” analogous to real-world physical bulletin boards. Like other social media systems, Pinterest wants to recommend new content to its users to keep them engaged with the service. In 2018, Pinterest introduced a system called Pixie as a component of their overall recommendation infrastructure (Eksombatchai et al., 2018). It uses a graph model to represent the connections among items, then explores that graph in a randomized way to generate recommendations. In this chapter, we’ll build our own system based on the graph algorithms used by Pixie.