Recommendation engine needs ALOT of work

[iluvthe80s]

I just singed up to the site about 20 mins ago and ranked 10 films (all of which were 80's movies) and I then check out the recommendations that your site suggested and none of them were even close to movies I would watch and 99% of them are from movies released in the last 10 years and obscure movies that have nothing to do with the titles I have ranked highly.

This makes the 4th sitle like this that I have joined in the past 2 days and none of them seem to know how to create a rec engine that actually works. I mean amazon does a decent job at it when I search for a movie, it list movies that are of the same era and genre as the one I searched for, so why can't sites like this do the same when the whole idea of the site is to make it easy to find films that I would love based on the films that I already love.

I guess the search continues

[Ag0stoMesmer]

Hello iluvthe80s, I don't speak for the site or anything but have been using it for a little while now. Like you I looked hard for something like this and Criticker is by far the best I've found.

The recommendations get better the more movies you rate, going to rank more films and spending a few mins will really help.

There's a create your own recommendation feature you may have missed on the right side and about halfway down the front page, again this improves with more films rated.

Another cool thing here are collections, try searching for 80, comedy or whatever here.

Finally, you could ask for recommendations here in the forums, despite the lack of niceties and 'robust' debates there are some really knowledgeable film fans here across many genres and time periods, don't be shy.

[td888]

I just singed up to the site about 20 mins ago and ranked 10 films (all of which were 80's movies) and I then check out the recommendations that your site suggested and none of them were even close to movies I would watch and 99% of them are from movies released in the last 10 years and obscure movies that have nothing to do with the titles I have ranked highly.

I guess the search continues

What do you expect with just 10 rankings? Magic? How can any algorithm do anything useful with that amount of data?

You have to take a leap of faith and just start ranking many more films. There's a reason this site has 10,420,000 Movie Rankings and Counting...

[PeaceAnarchy]

so why can't sites like this do the same when the whole idea of the site is to make it easy to find films that I would love based on the films that I already love.

No, see this is where you're mistaken. Recommendation sites like Criticker find films that you would love based on all the films you've rated, as a group, not based on the individual films you love. I know this distinction sounds semantic, but it makes a big difference when you've only rated 10 films. The type of recommendation engine you expect is what gets you the nonsensical recommendations imdb or amazon give you. I suppose it may be possible to create a better variation of that, but it requires a lot more metadata and information than ranking based recommendations.

Rate a random sample of 100 films you've seen, not just films you love, and you may get better results. Also, criticker is a score prediction site, so if you have constraints on what you want it to recommend, like just 80s movies, then you'll want to set a filter for that.

[mwgerb]

It took some time, but I created a personalized recommendation engine specifically for you: http://goo.gl/wDLnMa

For the rest of us that watch more than one very specific type of movie, Criticker will work just fine.

[cagedwisdom]

I mean amazon does a decent job at it when I search for a movie, it list movies that are of the same era and genre as the one I searched for, so why can't sites like this do the same when the whole idea of the site is to make it easy to find films that I would love based on the films that I already love.

This is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what makes a good recommendations engine. The fact that you prefer Amazon's (which is incredibly dumb) over more sophisticated engines is really strange. If you want to just find 80s films on Criticker, you can easily do that too - but Criticker doesn't factor in that kind of "metadata" about what kind of film you have said you liked, it just calculates recommendations by how highly you have ranked films, how highly other people have ranked those same films, and how highly other people have ranked other films. That's it. Because pretty much no one has ranked only 80s films, there is absolutely no way this system will ever provide you with just 80s recommendations (though you're likely to get some), and that's exactly the way it should be because what you're proposing is stupid. You can always find that through the "Create Your Own Recommendation" box if you want something specific.

You'll need at least a few hundred rankings before you can expect to get recommendations that are actually worth a damn. In the meantime you can explore the Film Database where you can set a number of filters, for "recommendations" (year, genre, popularity, etc).

[EbelC]

It's not a site that finds films you would loved based on films you already love, it's a place that finds how much would you like a film based on the biggest amount of data of films you've watched, not just tell you what to look for, but also what would better be avoided. So, unless you've only seen 10 movies in your life, ranking just 10 and expecting it to work it's just lazy. It's impossible to offer anything good with that, the site needs to know also what you don't like, so I've seen your ranks and some of those pictures you love are considered pictures you barely like, because the engine needed to force what you don't like based on that small amount of data. The site offering something after just 10 ranks is just to start showing something, but for the site to actually work I guess a minimum of 200 would be necessary, and of course if it's just 10 they can't be all movies you loved, at least you would need a movie you vote 1, another you vote 2... etc until you have the full spectrum.

I tell you, I've checked many sites and Criticker is the best one I found for that issue.

[BadCosmonaut]

I agree with td888. You can't expect good recommendations from just a few ratings. I have 1800 I imported from IMDb and the recommendations so far are looking really good. Expecting good recommendations from anything less than a few hundred movies (maybe more) seems silly to me.