"New Meetup Group ..."

I'm fortunate enough to be a member of a couple of fine Meetup groups (including the exponentially growing London-on-Board). It does a simple thing well: enable like-minded people to run a club or group.

When joined, Meetup gets a list of your interests and later mails you if relevant groups setup near you. But, like almost all other recommendation engines, the results are curious ....

• "The Black Entrepenurs Meetup"
• The Muslim Thinkers Meetup"

Which is a strange selection, given the interests I've selected on my profile:

Programming - Data Visualization - Machine Learning - Data Science - Data Mining - Big Data - Board Games - Country Western Music - War Games - Rock Climbing - Alt-Country - Wargaming - Science - Evolution - Computational Biology

The next one upped the ante:

• "The Black Atheists Meetup"

Can't quite fit this with one of the previous recommendations but maybe it's because I've got a funny foreign name?

• London Growth Marketing Meetup

Okay, this just gotten random.

• "Creative Circle (18-30)"

Much as I'd like to be eligible, I'm not.

A bunch of IT and coding ones followed, until:

• "Indian Singles 30s and 40s Group"

The 'funny name' hypothesis is definitely correct. Although Meetup is still confused as to how old I am.

• "Crick Crack Storytelling Club"
• "Sapphic Salon"

Beyond this point, it got worse to the point of being random. I'd be harder on Meetup if most recommendation engine wasn't also crap (i.e. the way Amazon keeps pushing women's clothing and Frank Skinner DVDs at me).