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Search and "For You": finding what to study next

The Library's Recommended row and Search's "For You" results run on similar logic but answer different questions - browsing vs. looking for something specific.

Encodr surfaces recommendations in two different places, and they're easy to conflate but built for different moments.

The Library's Recommended row: browsing

This is what shows up when you open the Library with no specific idea of what you want - a behavior-weighted row that favors what you've actually finished and kept coming back to over what you said you liked once during onboarding. See how Encodr picks your first deck for the full mechanics of that weighting. It's built for the moment you're deciding what to study next without a specific target in mind.

Search's "For You": looking for something specific

Search runs its own "For You" section, built from the same underlying match logic but shown alongside actual search results rather than as a standalone browsing row - useful when you already know roughly what you're looking for (a subject, a book, an exam) and want the results ranked with your own history in mind, not just a plain keyword match. If you type "chemistry" and you've already got a chemistry-heavy MCAT deck going, "For You" is what surfaces that relevance instead of a flat alphabetical list of everything containing the word.

Why they're not unified into one system

Browsing and searching are different intents. Browsing wants "surprise me with something I'd actually finish" - which is why the Recommended row leans hard on what you've completed. Searching wants "help me find the specific thing I'm already thinking of, but rank it sensibly" - a much more literal task where the query itself carries most of the signal, and personalization is a tiebreaker, not the main driver. Collapsing both into one mechanism would make browsing feel like a search box with no query, and search feel like it's ignoring what you actually typed.

What this doesn't touch

Neither of these decides what shows up in your study feed once you've actually enrolled in something - that's a separate mechanism entirely, covered in inside the feed. Search and Recommended are both about discovery, before you've committed to studying anything; the feed is about what happens after you have.

Encodr turns this into a habit: study anything in a feed, and it schedules the rest.

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