Poorly, its either shovel so much shit against a wall to see what sticks (youtube) or you sorta watched this for 10 minutes to see if you liked it but you didn't but here is more (netflix).
Curated lists made by humans are still nicer.
5 billion YT videos, comprising 1 billion hours, are watched every day, a meteoric rise ever since they improved the recommendation engine.
That recommendation engine has also been accused of contributing to the rise in polarization and conspiracy theories world-wide. So it may not be a force for good. But it's damn powerful.
However, if YouTube was as good at recommending books as it was recommending videos, I would never use its book recommendation algorithm. You necessarily have to get almost every book recommendation “correct” for it to be seen as actually useful by the user.
When I see a book recommendation, I read the associated review (if it has one), read other people's reviews, look at the author and the blurb, and, yes, even the cover.
That tells me much more than a YouTube thumbnail, with only a little more time (but of course I'm going to put more time into choosing a book that might take me two weeks to finish). Indeed, my initial filter is probably much the same as a YouTube thumbnail: I skim past many recommendations based on the genre and author alone.
I think if the Times Book Review always wrote reviews in which 1 out of 15 of them made me thing "I need to get that book," I'd be amazed at how much they "get" me. I wouldn't bother with anything else. Every 15 recommendations lands me another "must-read?" Sign me up!
The problem listed in the article is that Goodreads is no where near 1 out of 15.