Integrating recommender systems like that of Amazon and Youtube has become pretty easy with Apache Mahout. This article referenced here explains the following :

• Use cases where Mahout should be use
• The infrastructure needed
• How to scale this infrastructure

Check out the article here : http://ssc.io/deploying-a-massively-scalable-recommender-system-with-apache-mahout/

There is also a book available that explains using Mahout in details : http://www.manning.com/owen/

Recently Ars Technica published a good article about Google being awarded a Software Patent (by USPTO) that covers the principle of distributed MapReduce.

The importance of this event lies in the fact that many of todays leading software companies use MapReduce based projects. It is slightly scary for these players especially the users of the Hadoop and the CouchDb projects Read more…