• Fortune, Wednesday, November 22, 2006 11 AM

So-called "recommender" engines are the next step in search and human laziness, and such sites are "sprouting up on the Web like mushrooms after a hard rain," decries the magazine. These sites recommend stuff for you, from movies to recipes, based on personality tests and accumulated Web history. In a way, they present a challenge to Google (or new acquisition territory). Marketers are licking their chops.

At Whattorentcom, you take a personality test that recommends movies based on your answers. Are you a "Raging Bull" or a "Lawrence of Arabia" kind of guy? Not sure? Now you can find out. Newcomers to the recommendation biz, like MyStrands and StumbleUpon, and old-timers like Amazon.com and Netflix, all indicate that we may be leaving the era of search and entering one of discovery. Discovery finds are based on information about you, rather than you pro-actively searching for something.

The question is: is there a (legal) way to collect all the data about places we go and the things we buy? Marketers hope so. "Recommender" sites are currently in their most rudimentary form; imagine where they'll be in 10 years.

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