1. E
foursquare explore
+
assorted data fun
@benlee

2. Overview
foursquare data stats
explore
similar places
interesting phrases
venue transitions
2

3. Data
15,000,000+ people
30,000,000+ places
1,500,000,000+ check-ins

4. 4

5. E
foursquare explore

9. Explore Flow
• Query parsing
• Retrieval
• Ranking
• Reason generation

10. Overview: Retrieval
Venue
Index
Check-in
Candidate Venues History
Venue Social Personal
attributes Interactions Interactions

11. Overview: Ranking / Reasons
Venue Social Personal
attributes Interactions Interactions
Personal
Global scores Social Scores Scores
Top K venues
Global Social Personal
reasons reasons reasons

12. Global attributes
• Time decayed popularity
• Time of day / day of week filtering
• Total interactions (# tips, todos etc)

13. Blue bottle

14. Social / Personal scores
• # Friends that have checkins
• Tips left by friends, etc
• Prior visits by user
• Similar places user has been in the past

15. Venue Similarity
vi vj
Venues
for all i,j
sim(vi, vj)
Users
Incredibly Sparse
Matrix

16. Venue Similarity w/ MapReduce
key
user visited venues map
vi, vj score emit “all” pairs of visited venues
for each user
vi, vj score
...
key
vi, vj score score ... score reduce
Sum up each user’s score contribution
final score to this pair of venues

17. 17

18. 18

19. Reason generation
- “Dennis left a tip here”
- “You and 4 friends have been here”
- “This place is on your To-do list”
19

20. Improving explore
New signals
– Tourist / Local
– Everyday / Once-and-awhile
– Expert rank
Retrieval improvment
–Synonyms / query rewriting
–Query category matching
–Menu text
20

21. E
assorted data fun

22. Interesting phrases
• Hack day project on tip text
• Build a n-gram model, find “improbable”
phrases relative to background corpus
• Inspired by Amazon’s statistically
improbable phrases (SIPs) feature

23. 69 Modern Classics
Condensed via Amazon’s SIPs
barn cellar, famous pig, grey spider, old sheep,
egg sac

24. 69 Modern Classics
Condensed via Amazon’s SIPs
stillsuit manufacturer, panoplia propheticus,
gom jabbar, inkvine scar, ducal signet, factory
crawler, poison snooper

25. Interesting Venue Phrases
drip coffees, best coffee, jack dorsey, no wifi,
using square

26. Interesting Venue Phrases
bootie sf, hubba hubba revue, death guild

27. Interesting Venue Phrases
salted caramel, balsamic strawberry, roasted
banana, honey lavender,

28. City level phrases
fried chicken, blue bottle, french toast
breakfast tacos, mexican martinis, fried
avocado
deep dish pizza, celery salt, hot dog
clam chowder, lobster roll, red sox
bread pudding, cafe au lait, bloody mary

29. Phrases by time

30. Venue transitions
Users check in ~3 times a day
What can we learn from where they go next?
30

31. 31

32. 32

33. Thanks
foursquare.com/jobs
@benlee