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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.'"
...why isn't this being presented as a Google Reviews service, reviewing anything and everything? Now THAT would become a cultural phenomenon.
am i the only one that feels like google is trying to get it's hands in too many pies? wasn't the best part of the search engine that it did one thing simply and well. it seems that apple is being crucified for trying to branch out a bit with the ipod photo and shuffle, yet google gets deified for everything it touches.
It will not beat IMDb. Maybe Google will try to buy it soon and turn it into GMDb (Google Movie Database).
I got a chuckle out of the #1 entry for a Google Search for "movies:christmas lights"
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
movie: ZIP
Brings up showtimes at local theaters... Goodbye moviefone hello google
There really isn't any major difference other than that Google Movies doesn't have a front page like RT does, rather it's just a huge DB of reviews. That said however, RT has become increasingly cluttered/ad-riddled since they were picked up by the IGN/GameSpy group, so I see this as a positive thing both for the lack of distractions, and hopefully encouraging RT(and by reflection, Google) in to improving these services.
I came. I saw. I like RottenTomatoes better. Seeing twenty, one-sentence reviews at a glance works better for me everytime. Sorry.
"val kilmer popcorn" brings up Real Genius
"mike and the bots" brings up MST3k - as the second hit (apparently The Phantom was crying out to be MSTed)
Of course, Rotten Tomatoes picks an exemplary or pithy line from the review to quote, whereas google simply takes the first line of the review, or the line containing your search term. The convenience of having it built into google is seductive, though.
Hmm, this looks farily nice, when it finds the movie that you are looking for.I particularly like that it works well for searching for the name of a particular actor. The biggest problem I've found when playing around with it is that it doesn't seem to offer spelling suggestions,for example if you type "movie:Shawn of the Dead" it returns no results, but simply running a google search for "Shawn of the Dead" the first result is for the actual title "Shaun of the Dead". There also doesn't seem to be any sort of spell checking, so for example you get lots of results for "movie:Vin Diesel" but no results or spelling suggestions for "movie:Vin Diesal". (you may now engage in making fun of my taste in movies and actors).
The sort by rating function is nice, I tried typing "movie:2005" and sorted by rating to get a list of top rated movies of 2005.
Another example of strangeness I've found is that for current movies, it gives you a chance to search for show times, but does not show the results for the movie until after you search for show times, for example, I entered "movie:Hitch" and had to enter my zip code to search for show times, and on THAT results page it gave me the reviews results.
Overall, good idea google, but it does still need some work, I think I'll stick with imdb for now.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
I won't complain about famous reviewers like Roger Ebert getting top listing (he always does on IMDB under "external reviews"), but it seems strange that there are so many reviews from Boxoffice Online, Epinions.com, and rec.arts.movies.reviews. And yet, no where is a smaller independent reviewer like http://www.filmguru.net/ mentioned. What's up with that?
(Shameless plug)
--FilmGuruWhat makes this different from Rotten Tomatoes? And I am genuinely asking this question, not being a horrible sarcastic person.
The difference is that Rotten Tomatoes has a confusing, graphics-heavy, vomit-colored home page, whereas Google is sparse, utilitarian, and fast.
Maybe some people like confusing, graphics-heavy, vomit-colored pages. There seem to be a lot of them (at least the confusing, graphics-heavy bit). I've always liked Google for it's simplicity. That and the fact that it works.
Just for kicks, I tried to find one of my favorite films, Year of the Devil (Rok Dabla) on Rotton Tomatoes. Didn't find a thing.
Google told me more than I could ever want to know about the film, the actors, the studio that made it, the cinemas and times that the film was playing, where to buy the DVD, etc. Everything except where to find an .srt with English subtitles.
The same thing happens for "Ray" and "Million Dollar Baby". The interesting part is that it clearly knows that these are movies, because it offers to find nearby theatres. If you do a search for a nonsense word or phrase, you don't get the same offer.
So why is it suppressing reviews of currently playing movies? It's enough to make one speculate about Hollywood pressure, but I'm sure there's a more innocent explanation.
The last /. google story was on the new google campus in the Dalles.
What happens when you combine the following:
1)A huge bundle of OC lines running down the Columbia Gorge. (some for a Hanford-Los Alimos network, some for Internet2, and some standard teir one backbone.)
2)30 acres, and possible 80 acres more of server farms in an inductrial park.
3)A 2000 mW power plant less than a mile away, with google asking for a guaranteed supply AND a guarantee that the power-hungry aluminium smelting plants won't re-open.
4) Google's recent purchases around the country of dark fibre.
5) The release of a google movie tool.
Video servers need to be magnitudes more powerful than a normal SQL/static HTMl web page...It seems to me as if google is slowly setting up for a video on demand service.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I think the major difference is that with a site like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb, you need to already know the name of the movie you're looking for. Whereas, with Google you could (in theory at least) simply search for a phrase from a movie or a description of a scene or whatever.
..."
I can see this being very useful. "What was the name of that movie where CmdrTaco defends Earth from the space aliens?
Err am I the only one for which it says
"Find theaters near you
[homotown] [go]
[x] Remember this location"?
Prepares for onslaught of "yes, yes you are" replies.