

Share with HN: A good movie recommendation engine  - rokhayakebe
http://clerkdogs.com/
I like to watch movies. But my biggest problem is to get good recommendations. I have been using clerkdogs for several months. It is kind of slow, but their engine is great at suggesting movies that I may like. I do not think the site is popular, but as a happy user I wanted to share it with HN. If you know of any great recommendation web app please share it.
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allenbrunson
Not 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.

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sgt
I 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.

~~~
dkasper
You have to wait for it to autocomplete the title and then click on one of the
completions.

~~~
minalecs
this is a terrible ui decision. I'm typing in names, and pressing match, then
godfather continously comes up. *star wars isn't even in the drop down, when i
type star wars.

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rokhayakebe
Hi guys, I am not affiliated with ClerkDogs in no way, shape or form. Below is
the email I sent to the person Linkedin suggest owns it. I just like the site
and I thought I would share it.

....................

Hello Mr Skorman,

My name is Elly. I have been using Clerkdogs for more than a year now. It
seems the service has been on autopilot and most of the time it is extremely
slow.

I just wanted to note that I think you have the best recommendation engine for
movies. CD is one of those few apps I would really love to see get bigger and
better.

I hope this few words will reencourage the team to keep working on it, make it
faster, faster and faster.

Great job, great site, great tech ... just slow :).

Cheers guys,

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carbocation
I 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.

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michuk
Filmaster (<http://filmaster.com>) has an open source movie recommendation
engine based on the ideas developed during the Netflix contest. It's
documented at the Filmaster wiki: <http://filmaster.org> and its source is
freely available at bitbucket. Worth a try.

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tansey
Judging by the comments here, it's clear that if you just prefaced this link
with "Hi HN, here's my site, it's a little slow right now since it's in beta,
but we plan on scaling it up before we launch.", then it may have been more
positively reviewed.

For what it's worth, I typed in Usual Suspects and I do like all the top 5
results. The "creative pick" for me was a movie called Unknown, which I've
ironically never heard of before. I'm going to watch it tonight.

Also, I don't understand why you say "In association with Netflix" at the
bottom, but all the results have a tag for Blockbuster-- am I missing
something here?

One thing I did not like was that if I hover over white space in the results,
it still displays the summary of the movie. I found that jarring, because I
expect to actually be hovering over either the thumbnail or the link(s) for
the item before seeing additional info.

I think the feature that shows you why you're recommending (e.g., "less
complex") is really cool. However, one of them seemed kind of spoilerish,
because it was recommended as "less double crosses"-- most of the time with a
whodunit, part of the story is wondering who's going to get double crossed. So
it may not be as specific as a complete spoiler, but it's still not preferable
to me.

I do have to second hating the forced auto-complete clicking. I could tell by
the way the UI was acting that it's how it worked, so I didn't have a problem,
but I see how a lot of users would.

On the movie detail page, you don't need the three links to Related Movies,
Movie DNA, and Details; they're all right there in plain sight. I'd also be
interested in seeing a complete "Movie DNA" breakdown, since you're clearly
only making the top 10 or so available. Maybe that's proprietary knowledge and
you don't want to let go of it.

Not a big fan of the tag cloud for filtering results. When I look at that, I
just see a big blob of text and my brain shuts off without processing it. I
don't know what approach would be better off the top of my head, but the tag
cloud is not working for me.

In general, there's a cluttered feel to the details page. I like the info, but
the design could use some TLC.

Question: where did you get the movie data? I'm assuming based on the info at
the bottom that you're using Muze, which I've never heard of until now. How
does it compare to IMDB's web service? How do you use it? Are you happy with
it or are there things that really bug you? Was it easy to integrate into your
site?

I like the site, love the recommendation engine which is clearly where 95% of
the effort probably went, and think it could be a really useful service. Make
the changes I noted above and you may just have me hooked. :)

~~~
rokhayakebe
Tansey, thanks for the feedback. But I am not affiliated with the site. I am
just a long time fan and user.

~~~
tansey
Ah... usually the "* HN: *" title indicates showing off something someone made
or asking a question. I'll submit it to the site directly. :)

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kurtosis
Honest Criticism: Too slow. I don't like being put on hold. Please just make
it fast.

~~~
amix
Their site should be so easy to scale as most of it is static data that can be
cached by something like Varnish.

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samratjp
FYI: These two just as good, if not different.

<http://www.jinni.com/>

I do also like <http://www.nanocrowd.com/> too...

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binbasti
I really like the recommendations. Already found a bunch of movies I should've
stumbled over before but never have.

Some things, in no particular order:

* The SuperMatch UI needs some more love! Just watch someone new to the site use it and you'll see what I mean.

* I think you should remove the footnote "Clerkdogs supports Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7". If you have requirements show a notice only when they aren't met.

* You need to fix the search field not working as expected as soon as possible. Seriously.

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sharpn
Very 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).

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psyklic
I thought the site's URL (clerkdogs.com) was a cross between Clerks and
Reservoir Dogs! :)

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please
No recommendations for the first 5 movies I entered. Looks a bit to generic
and mainstream to me.

~~~
rokhayakebe
What titles did you try?

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riffer
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

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yurifury
After 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.

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mistermann
1\. Great idea, if it works, doesn't imdb already do this though? 2\. Enter
Book of Eli, press enter. Peruse "21 handpicked matches for Crocodile Dundee".
Hmmmm.

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rokhayakebe
The site is slow. When you type the title you have to wait for the
autocomplete and click on the movie. The speed is the biggest problem, but it
gives good recs.

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covercash
I've gotten good results from <http://nanocrowd.com> in the past.

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omnipath
Netflix

