ActsAsSimilar ============= I had a need to find items that were similar to an item. I looked at acts_as_recommendable, and while this was very nice plugin, it was too slow when working with large data sets. I also decided that the results I needed didn't need to be scientifically accurate, just a rough match. So I created this plugin to allow for a very elementary way to find items that are similar to the object you are working with. This works best when used with a has_many :through relationship. Basically all it is doing is looking for other objects of the same class, that have some related value. Example 1 ========= Look for similar playlists, using the videos as what defines similarity. This will look for all playlists that have a similar video as the playlist you are looking against. class Playlist has_many :playlists_videos has_many :videos, :through => :playlists_videos acts_as_similar :videos end Example 2 ========= Look for similar playlists, using the title of the playlist as the similarity item. This will look for all playlists that have a similar title as the playlist you are looking against. class Playlist has_many :playlists_videos has_many :videos, :through => :playlists_videos acts_as_similar :field => :title end Example 3 ========= Look for similar playlists, using the video_id of the playlists_videos as the similarity item. This will look for all playlists that have a similar video_id as the playlist you are looking against. class Playlist has_many :playlists_videos has_many :videos, :through => :playlists_videos acts_as_similar :playlists_videos, :field => :video_id end Execute ========= @playlist = Playlist.first @playlist.similar Notes ========= This is a work in progress and is intended to provide very basic functionality. Copyright (c) 2009 [Randy Girard (https://www.randygirard.com], released under the MIT license