Personalized Sections With Reordering

Introduction

Modern news homepages often display multiple topical sections (e.g., World, Politics, Technology, Sports). With Recombee, you can personalize both:

1. The order of sections shown to each user — prioritizing what they care most about.
2. The articles within each section — filled with personalized picks per category.

This approach not only enhances engagement but also delivers a more intuitive and relevant browsing experience.

Reorder Sections for Each User

In the first step, we will acquire the personalized order for each user.

Segmentation Setup

Start by creating a Segmentation based on the item property that represents article categories (e.g., category or categories).

In the Recombee Admin UI, navigate to Segmentations and click Create.

1. Choose Segmentation Type – Property-based.
2. Select the property that holds the article's category information.

Once created, this Segmentation will represent the different homepage sections that can be personalized in order.

If your section definitions are more complex (e.g., based on multiple item properties), explore the other toptions for creating Item Segmentations.

Scenario Setup

In the Recombee Admin UI, navigate to the Scenarios section and choose Create Scenario.

1. Enter a Scenario ID, such as "homepage-sections-ordering".
2. Choose Recommendation type – Item Segments to User.
3. Set Results Segmentation – select the Segmentation created above.

Logic

The Logic defines the behavior of the recommendation engine.

• Select the news:categories-for-you logic type from the News models.

This Logic ranks sections by how relevant they are to each user based on their reading history and preferences.

Requesting Recommendations

Use the Recommend Item Segments to User endpoint with an API SDK.

The response will contain section IDs (e.g., "sports", "politics", etc.) in personalized order, which you can use to construct the homepage layout.

Populate Sections with Personalized Articles

Now we will fill the individual categories with articles from the particular sections.

Scenario Setup

In the Recombee Admin UI, navigate to the Scenarios section and choose Create Scenario.

1. Enter a Scenario ID, such as "homepage-articles-per-section".
2. Choose Recommendation type – Items to Item Segment.
3. Set Context Segmentation – use the same Segmentation from previous step.

Logic

The Logic defines the behavior of the recommendation engine.

• Select the news:personal logic type from the News models.

This Logic recommends personalized articles from within each category, tailored to the user’s interests.

Filters

You may want to apply additional filters, e.g., to only include recent content. Use the Filters tab to add such rules.

2. Widget SDKs – use the SDK to render the section as a Carousel, Grid, or Feed.
   Initialize the widget using the Recommend Items to User endpoint and specify the latest-news Scenario.

3. API SDK – use the SDK of your choice to call the Recommend Items to User endpoint and specify the latest-news Scenario.

Requesting Recommendations

Using API SDK

• Use the Recommend Items to Item Segment endpoint for each section, passing the section’s ID as a parameter.
• To optimize performance, combine all requests into a single Batch request using your preferred SDK.
• Each response within the batch will return personalized articles for one section row.
• To avoid duplicating articles across sections, set the distinctRecomms parameter of the batch request to true.

Using Widget SDKs

• Use the Widget SDKs to render the section as a Carousel or a Grid.
• Initialize each widget using the Recommend Items to Item Segment endpoint and specify the section’s ID and the homepage-articles-per-section Scenario.
• The SDK automatically handles deduplication of content across sections.