Well, it didn't work for me. If it is any consolation, no recommendation service usually does.<p>Here is the problem: recommendation engines usually try to match common variables between the movie you like and other movies - kudos to nanocrowd for doing this at a more sophisticated level than "it has the same actor in it" - but most fail to weigh heavily enough the quality of the movie (Netflix is notorious bad at this). More to the point, the movies that people really love have some personal connection with them that I am not sure is open to crowdsourcing.<p>I will now give you an example: I love the movie Pitch Black. Why? Yes, there's the action/horror tension, and the fabulous spaceship crash, and the charismatic lead - but the reason I <i>love</i> that movie is because of its kernel which is a highly moral tale about the salvation of caring for someone other than yourself, and of the powerful human need to seek redemption.<p>Now I am not going to reproduce this here, but go put in Pitch Black in nanocrowd and you will see the problem: it focuses on the superficial properties of the plot, and none of the movies recommended come even close.<p>What is the closest movie in feel that I have seen? The Station Agent. Now the day I type in "Pitch Black" in a recommendation and get back "The Station Agent" is the day I am going to sell all my wordly goods to buy stock in that company.<p>(That said it is safe to say most people aren't as picky as me, and I am sure you can find some success with this model especially if you harness it to something people visit a lot anyway, like IMDB or Netflix).
The autocomplete is nice. The selection is lacking. There seem to be virtually no foreign films, for example. The most important implication of this is that I've already seen everything it recommends (but that at least means that the recommendation algorithm is on target).<p>Making the user click on a nanogenre after entering a movie is unnecessary - you could show at least a partial list of all of them instead (and maybe show more of a particular list if you click on it).<p>Overall, I like clerkdogs better, mainly due to the wider selection.
The problem I see is that it <i>forces</i> the user to pick a 'nanogenre', a set of 3 arbitrary characteristics - what if I'm looking for a mix of charateristics from within the different nanogenres? It won't let me choose the exact mix of characteristics I want and instead, restricts me to the ones it displays.<p>I understand that recommendation engines need to work within certain predefined parameters, but that's exactly why they'll usually disappoint - you can't categorise a person's preferences into predefined parameters. Most of the time, there's no real reason <i>why</i> someone likes a movie and hates a logically related movie.<p>Personally, I prefer clerkdogs.com
I wonder if this suffers from the <i>Napoleon Dynamite Problem</i>:<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html?partner=permalink" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Netflix-t.html?...</a>
I searched on some of my favorite movies and was very impressed with the accuracy of the results. I've seen 95% of the movies it recommended, but I loved almost all of the ones it did. I think this would be good for finding movies that I would like to watch that are outside of my normal genres.
The site looks great, and your auto-complete is amazing! How can IMDB not have that?<p>However, i entered Sweeny Todd. I get a mostly blank page and am asked to pick a sub-genre. None of which really fit what i'm looking for (dark & musical). so I try the sub-genre thing, and it just isn't working.
But then I see the left column with "movies most like". I'm assuming that is the main feature of the site. So why on earth do you not put that front and center, and if I want sub-genre, I can do that after??<p>Aside from that, i think the service is pretty good.
I guess it's Pandora's HGP for movies, which is cute, but presenting me with buckets doesn't really work.<p><a href="http://nanocrowd.com/genre/nanogenre/id/3629" rel="nofollow">http://nanocrowd.com/genre/nanogenre/id/3629</a> - The Iron Giant is all of these things, not just one.
Wow! I think it indeed does. I clicked on the link thinking "sure... another recommendation engine" but I was surprised at the effectiveness of the method they use to make the suggestions: "3-word nanogenre." I searched for one of my favorite movies 'MirrorMask', clicked on 'fantasy, wondrous, surreal' nanogenre, and I got a list of films, many of which I loved:<p><a href="http://nanocrowd.com/movie/genremovies/genreId/1814/movieId/7057" rel="nofollow">http://nanocrowd.com/movie/genremovies/genreId/1814/movieId/...</a>
There really hasn't been a good movie recommendation engine since LikeMinds got sold to IBM and their MovieCritic.com site was shuttered.<p>One of the original brains behind their collaborative filtering technology launched a similar site a few years ago at moviepig.com, but sadly the entire thing is done in flash and the design is so awful that it eclipses the fact that it makes pretty solid movie recommendations after you rank order a couple dozen movies. Worth a try.