Recommendation Site The Filter Adds Ex-Googler Merrill On The White-Label Trail

The Filter, the Peter Gabriel-backed digital entertainment recommendation site, has appointed Doug Merrill, former CIO of Google (NSDQ: GOOG), to its board of directors, as it ramps up its strategy to white-label its recommendation engine to third-party content sites. The Filter says it has two big deals that it will announce later this month, for a customer each in Europe and the U.S.. Merrill’s appoint is a non-executive position.

The company, which first launched in 2008 as a standalone consumer service, has been offering recommendation services to other content sites for the better part of a year now. It’s racked up several high-profile customers in the process: Sony (NYSE: SNE) Music Entertainment (which uses it in its music player MyPlay); online video rental site DVDPost; ThePlatform and Evolver.net, along with We7, the Gabriel-backed music site. The Filter also says it “collaborates” with Nokia (NYSE: NOK), presumably on Nokia Music, although a spokesperson would not confirm this directly.

It seems an obvious move to partner with other content sites, since recommendation alone – with recommendations occasionally attached to actual content – looks like it has a limited appeal. TechCrunch points out that The Filter currently gets about 800,000 unique visitors per month: a spokesperson tells us this is significantly less than the number of people using The Filter through third-party sites, which have a combined reach of about 20 million. Online is far outweighing mobile recommendations at this point, too.

But despite the slower traffic it plans to continue its own consumer-facing business, since “it