I’ve recently found that netflix has some problems with recommendations, and after doing a little searching around I’ve found that many other people have the same problem. In a comment on one of those blog entries, I found MovieLens.
MovieLens isn’t quite as elegant at displaying movies as netflix is, but the recommendations work really well. After you rate 13 movies, it starts giving you recommendations, estimating what they think you’ll rate them. As you rate more, the results are more accurate. They use a 5 star system just like netflix does, except you can select ratings in half star increments. Basically this gives you 10 different options to choose from rather than the paltry 5 that netflix offers. In addition to a better rating system, you can also filter search results by language, genre, year and various other things. You want to see only japanese horror films before 1997, no problem.
There is a little bit of hassle factor with using external recommendations though; if you want to add a movie to your netflix queue, you have to go over to netflix and search for it there in order to add it. I decided to get my feet wet writing Greasemonkey scripts (read a nifty Wired article that explains Greasemonkey here) by writing one that adds a link to each movie that completely automates the process.
Here’s without my Greasemonkey script:
Here’s with my Greasemonkey script:
You can get my Greasemonkey script right here, but note it is extremely ugly as I am really new to javascript and don’t really know what I’m doing. If anyone feels like suggesting better ways of doing this I would definately appreciate hearing it.
