That's an explanation for some of the examples, but I think a lot of the times it's actually really simple, along the lines of, "we sift through some data and correlate it". The odd thing is, that often works, especially for user-facing perceptual stuff where there's a strong placebo effect, even more especially if you salt liberally with some hand-tuned biasing. Sort of how The Sims is able to use some super-simple algorithms to give the impression of interesting characters.

However, if you do need some real magic to be done, and your product really won't work without it, then things get trickier; bad statistics, or at least statistics not really used correctly, is really common in the innards of these kinds of products.