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Google Announces 'Google Movies'
NW writes "Over at the official Google Blog, a new Google feature was announced - Google Movies. When using the 'movie:' operator in Google, it brings up movie reviews. At the first glance it looks like a custom search across movie review sites. There are also movie 'home pages' like this one which aggregate all reviews AND calculate the total score based on the number of stars. It looks like something similar to Google News - parsing all the reviews and it remains to be seen whether it will be expanded to something like IMDB. There is also no ads, probably for the same reason as Google News. The bottom of the page states 'The selection and placement of reviews on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. No movie critics were harmed or even used in the making of this page.'"
What makes this different from Rotten Tomatoes? And I am genuinely asking this question, not being a horrible sarcastic person.
Perhaps, however they are smart enough to realize that indexing all that information out there on the web is the way to go. I mean even with search engines, trying to find things on the web sometimes feels like standing under Niagra falls with a teaspoon (basically they want to be the guy who makes the teaspoon :-) ). And since they are already indexing everything up the wazoo, why not present the data they already have anyway in different ways?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
The problem that I foresee with this is timeliness. If you search for Sideways you don't get any results! I'll stick with Rotten Tomatoes.
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
They're search quality IS slipping. I have to dig further into the results to find something useful. And for general queries, for get about it! General queries results are filled with spammer results on the first couple of pages.
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
Doesn't this just encourage the movie industry to game the Google system and post fake good reviews for their movies? I mean, I know the industry already does this, but now they're encouraged to spam the Intarweb with more and more shill reviews to get their star rating up on Google.
It's been interesting over the last couple of months to see the new google services and how well they integrate with each other.
for instance, I use google local and at some point it squirreled away a cookie of my location. This information is used by google maps and also the movie reviews.
when I type movie: Hotel Rwanda it brings me to a listing of show times and links in my town. Another click on "7:40" brings me to the another site (movietickets.com, fandago.com, etc) where I can order a ticket. The point is: two clicks to getting movie tickets. Why would I go to any other site at this point? it's so easy with google, especially when I type it into the built in toolbar on my browser.
At this point it seems like any horizontal web app is a possible target for google.