Honest Criticism: Too slow. I don't like being put on hold. Please just make it fast.
Their site should be so easy to scale as most of it is static data that can be cached by something like Varnish.
Share with HN: A good movie recommendation engine
11–20 of 29 posts
Re: Share with HN: A good movie recommendation engine
#12I've gotten good results from http://nanocrowd.com in the past.
Re: Share with HN: A good movie recommendation engine
#13[deleted]
Re: Share with HN: A good movie recommendation engine
#14I typed in Star Wars, clicked on one of the options from your dropdown, and waited for a long time. That sucked. But then, I got some really detailed suggestions and long explanations of why each movie was a match. That was awesome!
I think if you fix the UI and expand your repertoire, you'll have a useful, interesting, popular tool.
Re: Share with HN: A good movie recommendation engine
#15After I finally got it to work, the recommendations were good! I don't want to see an explanation like "Similar Twist" when searching for matches with Fight Club, though.
Re: Share with HN: A good movie recommendation engine
#16Netflix
Re: Share with HN: A good movie recommendation engine
#17No recommendations for the first 5 movies I entered. Looks a bit to generic and mainstream to me.
What titles did you try?
Here is one that I was hoping it would work for: http://clerkdogs.com/movies/51923-intacto-2002/matches
Obscure, but that's kind of the point with this sort of app
On a sidenote: You can definitely resolve the speed issues people are talking / complaining about by pre-computing and storing everything, instead of doing it on the fly
Re: Share with HN: A good movie recommendation engine
#18I went to the site and it had prepopulated "A Fish called Wanda" in the search box. I remove it and type in "The straight story", and hit search. It went on to give me matches for a "A fish called Wanda". I repeated this several times, and reloaded the page. Sorry, but your service does not work. I'm using Chrome on OS X.
I had the same problem. Also very slow.
Re: Share with HN: A good movie recommendation engine
#19Very good matches when found, and excellent clear descriptions to justify the match. If this is driven by algorithm, it's brilliant. Slow & incomplete, but hey it's beta. Bookmarked - thanks for posting.
[edit] - just read the 'about us' page & it's not an algorithm. It's compiled by video store clerks, hence the name (doh).
Re: Share with HN: A good movie recommendation engine
#20Not directly related, but about movie recommendations in general.
I use and like Netflix. Their recommendations are not horrible, but based on the way they are presented to me, I think they must be doing it wrong. They'll show me something that says, in essence: "So, you liked this one particular 'gritty crime drama', so here's a bunch more of them you might like."
NO. I did not like the film because it was a "gritty crime drama." I liked it because it explored novel ideas that most movies won't touch, or because the people involved had the strength of their convictions and did not stoop to sensationalism and sloganeering, or because it wasn't full of car chases and gun fights and other insipid cliches, like 99 percent of films indulge in these days.
Personally, I couldn't care less about genres. I'll watch a sports film, or a kid's film, or a foreign film with subtitles, or anything else, so long as it's well-made.