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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.'"
The selection and placement of reviews on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. Doesn't say with what kind of algorithm, I'm willing to bed someone will pay something for this algorithm to favour them. This disclaimer means nothing.
The idea seems quite similar to what the guys at Rotten Tomatoes have done. To which I'm referring the aggregation of multiple reviews by critics across the movie circles. Which is an excellent site for movie reviews as well by the way.
Metacritic has been doing this for a while now, and I think they do it well. They also index game, music and book reviews, assigning them aggregate scores. It's my first source for research prior to video game rentals.