The Film Talk » Jinni – New Movie Recommendation Service Any Good?

Jinni – New Movie Recommendation Service Any Good?

January 24th, 2009by Jett Loe · Comments

Jinni

OK – as per previous posts:

Ben Kingsley Doesn’t Do It For Me / Transsiberian

The 2009 Oscar Nominated Films: Pirated Copies Available Everywhere

I think the future is instant digital download/stream of movies – often suggested by some sort of Learning Algorithm/Artificial Life Module.

So am excited to learn about jinni – a new web-based service that seems to be gettin’ all Pandora like for movies. I joined up and took a spin.

As seen in the frame grab at top – my first search for films related to what I was looking for: ‘robot gone amok’ returned no hits. This of course is not fair. I imagine jinni will take a while to learn from me what I like. I’ll try again.

Jinni

Ok, I’ve typed in ‘love is for suckers’. It returns ‘Ghost’. Hmm. It does better with the Naked Gun pictures – Frank Drebin always did have problems with his love life.

I imagine jinni’s algorithms will get better/be more finely tuned as more people use the service. I’ll try again. How about an intelligent, science fiction film for adults? I type in ’sci-fi critically acclaimed’.

Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith?

Yikes.

But 2001 and Children of Men are good pics – but jinni should have busted out with Stalker.

Let me ’story tune’ here – I’ll go with ‘critically acclaimed’ pics that are ‘little known’.

jinni

Bones?

Lost?

Quantum Leap?

OK – I’m stopping this now – I’m giving jinni far too hard of a time – it’s early days yet. I’m going to spend more time on the service and see if it improves – a real decent recommendation engine is a ‘holy grail’ of people in the content distribution industry – see Netflix’s X-Prize for instance:

This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize

and it’s only fair to point it’s gonna take a while to get there.

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Tags: Jett Loe · Technology

Mark

http://www.movies.monigo.com is pretty great, and working! alternatively, too.

Phoebe_b

Thanks for your thoughtful analysis of Jinni. We really welcome criticism to help us improve during our beta. Just a few responses to your observations:

As you saw “robots run amok” brings no results, though “robot gone awry” does (as does a search for movies like I, Robot, for example). The same applies to “love is for suckers” – e.g. “love is for losers” does bring results. We’re working hard to improve Jinni’s vocabulary so that users can type the phrases they think of into the search box and get results.

Critically acclaimed – we gather this data from several sources. If Revenge of the Sith is more popular than Stalker (and it is) and almost as acclaimed, it might appear first when searching for "Sci-fi critically acclaimed." (Revenge of the Sith gets 79% fresh out of 250 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, more than Return of the Jedi). Stalker isn’t yet in our catalog – you’ll see it on Jinni shortly.

In the last image, you’ve come across an error in our indexing of TV shows as critically acclaimed. The results for movies only are correct. Obviously we’re working on fixing this as quickly as possible.

I hope you’ll continue to play with Jinni and see quite rapid improvement over time. Feedback is always welcome and appreciated!

Jett Loe

Thanks for your response Phoebe_b - I appreciate that it's early days for the service :)

i'll keep trying jinni and look forward to finding some gems i've never seen! :)