Continuing Price Escalation & Sorting Algorithm News
posted by Ben Engebreth on 08.21.2005
It's shocking to look at, but gas prices have leaped in the last week and the latest report from AAA has the national average for regular unleaded at $2.60. It's hard to know what to say about this anymore. Prices are going up, but behavior doesn't seem to be changing too much yet. I think $3 is a pretty significant psychological point to hit. If we do see $3 gas, I think that people are really going to consider changing their travelling behavior & purchase decisions in order to limit driving expenses. Of course it's all speculation, but there has to be a point where the economics of it all merits a change.
In site news, I'm testing a new algorithm for the sorting of potential carpool partners for the site that should be more optimal in the way it sorts. I don't think it will make a difference with the relatively low density of users that Pooln currently has. However, in the future when there are (hopefully) more users of the site, it should help you find people who are more well suited to be your carpool buddy amongst a larger set of already well suited folks. It's basically just taking into account the advantage of having someone live or work along your commute route. For instance, if 2 people live 2 miles away from you, but one of them lives along your commute path, that person is the better person to carpool with. The current algorithm doesn't take this into account and only sees that these people live the same distance from you and thus scores them the same (on the home-home distance metric).
A reader suggested that I look into a way to make this change, and in a moment of clarity (I've thought about the problem before to no avail) I came up with a really easy straight forward solution. The only problem is translating it to a metric that I display in the search. Right now I display the sum of the home-home and work-work distances for potential carpool partners. That makes some physical sense (i.e. commute distance). This new algorithm doesn't have quite as nice of a numeric result. I'm thinking about how to better illustrate its meaning to the users still. More later I guess.
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