To be useful, the "Intersect" page should have:
- find near matches when there is no exact match with every book,
- ignore fake users (can any human read 80k books in many languages?),
- do not ignore users' votes (my input was books I liked, I expected to find users that rated them highly).
With the "Recommend" page I had the same problem as the GP, and all the recommendations were useless. To fix that, I think some features are needed:
- do not list books by authors from my list (I don't need recommendations for them),
- add a button for marking a suggested book as "disliked" (at the bare minimum, it should remove it from the suggestion, and ideally it should influence le suggestions as much as a "liked" book),
- do not suggest several books by the same author,
- add a button to hide a suggestion or show more suggestions (there were dozens of books I'd read but wouldn't rate high).