Life in Balance: Amit D. Chaudhary’s Blog
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I wrote earlier about Netflix prize: Netflix offers US $1 million and US $50k for improving it’s movie recommendation

As NetFlix user, I believe there are some more ways to a better Netflix. This is not to take away from Netflix’s recommendation system and those of MovieLens.
1. Better text search

The search on netflix is quite average. Searching for anything not popular shows it’s lack of accurate results. Try a search for Sardar which is the exact name of an Indian movie and it is not even on the first 5-10 results.

2. Better category in browse and search

It should be possible to find, say all movies in a category (Anime, Indian\Italian, Independent), or to limit results for movies released within a decade or certain years.
GreenCine, a smaller rental service has better search.
3. More emphasis on ‘add to queue’ and actual rental instead of matching algorithm’s expected movie rating to the actual rating which is what the prize is about.
A two part answer. Part one, It is important to add a movie to queue than to rate a movie correctly before the user does. A typical user, If I may speculate might rate an art movie like Schindler’s List higher than Die Hard With a Vengeance, but is more likely to rent Die Hard or another popular Hollywood fare.

Part two, adding to queue invariably leads to a hugh queue which in turn overflows. It is more important to see what the user ultimately rents than add to queue. This also takes covers the users who do not rate.

4.  Better user list management

The user movie lists\queue  does some have some simple features such as rename, merge, move across queue\lists, remove duplicate, remove rented, etc. This is specially useful for long term netflix customers,
These and other similar user focus will result in a better netflix.

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