Update: Nefflix officially announced the winner of the first contents today, and the beginning of the second contest. The winner of the first one is a team of engineers, statisticians and researchers. 

Read the release here.

If you follow Netflix news at all, you probably know that the company has had a contest in place for nearly three years. The prize was a million dollars, and the point of the contest was to see who could improve upon the site’s recommendation algorithm by 10%.

Netflix offered a million dollar reward to anyone who could improve upon their recommendation engine by ten percent. Two researchers accomplished a lot more with the “anonymized” dataset.

A number of people were suspicious when the Netflix Prize was announced. $1 million isn’t much of a reward, some complained, and others believed that it would be difficult to improve upon the site’s movie recommendation algorithm. Now, a little over one week into the contest, three teams have already beaten the existing system.