Google Adds Movie Ratings, Times, Reviews

Mike Skweir writes " I was going to take my daughter to the movies this afternoon and I wanted to find out more about the movie 'Kicking & Screaming'... so I Googled it. To my surprise the following response occurred . When I followed the link, it actually gave me several reviews, movie ratings and the ability to search for a theatre in my area." Once you've entered your zip code, it will also tell you what movies are playing in your area.

another google innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

What I wonder is where Google gets its ratings from, most movie titles always give you results to the IMDB where reviews can be found anyway...

Next?

[karthik_r085]

Next feature might be Music/Concert shows.

Sounds Handy...

[paulschroeder]

but will it let us know which ones to avoid [sonypictures.com]?

Such a Great Way to Market

[PogieMT]

Google's true genius might be the way they add new features...and let it all get advertised by users. Instead of the Yahoo model of cluttering up the main page so much that is unusable, Google just adds a feature--and people find out when they try it, or it ends up on a site like Slashdot

Google

[wcitechnologies]

If google starts issuing IDs for each user, I wouldn't be suprised if it became more important than a social security number.

Re:Rate web pages

[Chiasmus_]

They could ask you what type of search you are doing - technical research, entertainment, etc. and sort your results accordingly.

And in doing so, Google would create a brand new business model:

1. Create a website that advertises having pictures of Britney Spears and Natalie Portman in compromising positions and completely uninhibited, but of course contains only seven thousand banner ads.
2. Create hundreds of spambots to report to Google that your website is *the best* place to find quality research on apache, linux, lemmings, the San Francisco earthquake, herpes simplex B, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Calvinism, and navel lint.
3. Profit (see, that time step two existed)

Re:hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent! Time to get some Karma....

"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"

"Just use booble!!!
You can get all sorts of information on movies from Booble. http://www.booble.com/ [booble.com]"
(Note, not safe for work)

"Just wait for the next iteration...

And I quote, "Popcorn and a date to snuggle up with are up to you. For now."

Here's hoping for the best with all of their future plans!"

Re:Such a Great Way to Market

[ampmouse]

Actualy, it happens very often, usualy more then once. A article about the same topic [slashdot.org] was posted just about three months ago...

Too bad their information is incomplete

[L.Bob.Rife]

I would expect a company like google to use Cinema Source [cinema-source.com] since they are the #1 database clearinghouse of movietime information, that nearly every cinema in America communicates with.

Unfortunately, they seem to be using some other service which has incomplete records and doesn't even list some of my local theaters.

Compare for yourself by doing a search on moviefone or yahoo, and then check google.

Re:another google innovation

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

More appropriately, can Google host a page that it cannot cache?

Answers:

[PotatoHead]

1. Google is a totally great Linux / OSS / GPL success story. There is money to be made building great things for people to use on the OSS software stack.

2. I, for one am interested in new Google projects. Getting the most use out of an already very useful service is the powergeek thing to do. Heck, we are always talking about new things to do with hardware, software, etc... I don't see Google being any different.

2a. Where are the other cool projects coming from? MSN, Yahoo? (Well ok maybe the music thing, but we talked about that already.) Google is innovating in a big way, bringing lots of value to the net along for the ride. They have advanced the state of the art in web interfaces, scaleable file-systems, and search several times. Can't really say that about the others now can you?

3. Savvy? Are you sure you are reading the right site? The things that Google does are *hard*. --really hard. And they do it on OSS to boot! Remember #1, that is news for nerds and it is stuff that matters.

Re:Oh, isn't that old?

[presroi]

Okay, so if you live in the New York, you might actually try the following:

Use google to find a movie that might be worth the money you will be spending.
Use google to find a movie theatre that has the movie on schedule.
Use google's orkut or google's newly aquired dodgeball [dodgeball.com] to find someone to join your movie evening.
Use google ride [google.com] to order a cab to the movie theatre.
Use google groups to discuss the result of the evening.

So, if google was smart, they would enhance their APIs to encourage people to combine different google applications. My first attempt would be something like a google timewaster/blinddate/"hey, I'm new in this town, are there real people around?"/... Or is this something labs.google.com will provide in the next six months? and so on... I'm tired of this "what if google did a, b, c" I would like to do it myself.

Re:Bought reviews

[ignorant_coward]

Without even referencing the book or the BBC series, the movie itself wasn't assembled very well. There was some individual talent in the movie, but it was drained by the audio sounding like it was recorded in a gymnasium and the combined actors had no chemistry at all. It was like watching a high school film project. If this was the intent of the director, then the initial big-budget dolphin musical and the first-rate hollywood effects failed entirely to set the mood. I also wonder how much the actors struggled with green screens, as was the case in the Star Wars prequels.

Re:Such a Great Way to Market

[fm6]

And there you have it. Right now, the folks making the decisions are folks that think like us.

Sorry, but that's standard Geek bigotry. Most web surfers are not "people like us". Most people seem to be pretty tolerant of obnoxious advertising, and the 900 million people who surf the web these days are more representative of society at large, not Geek culture. So it's a little suprising that obnoxious ads are less effective online they they are in other media.

My theory is this: people are so inundated with advertising that they need a mechanism to filter them out, to keep from getting distracted to death. Most people seem to be adept and creating little cognitive filters to eliminate distraction. (Geeks, by and large, seem to be pretty poor at this -- I've often wondered if there isn't some neurological difference between Geeks and "normal" people.) So most people litterally don't see most of the ads that are thrown at them every day.

But by trying to make their ads less obnoxious, Google removed all the visual cues that these cognitive filters rely on. Which is why market research indicates that most people don't perceive Google ads as ads, even though they're clearly labeled as such! In other words, Google found a way to get past people's ant-ad wetware -- and found it purely by accident.

Re:unclear review selection criteria

[Theaetetus]

I do believe this is why:

Average rating
3.8 / 5
Based on 40 reviews

... and then they go on to list the 40 reviews individually with what each rated. Also, they state "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."
My guess is that the ranking of those reviews are determined through PageRank. Higher ranked sites get higher placement in the list of reviews. As for Filthy's review, could it be that a) they don't have a clear rating system that Google can automatically pull from the page (the graphic is the only key, rather than a text "2 out of 5 fingers" or something) or b) that Google is a family-friendly service, and they don't want to include a page that starts "I'm beginning to think those grassfuckers in Hollywood aren't paying attention to me. All this time, I thought they gave a shit. Maybe not, though. I can't even count the number of times I've told those assholes that we want to be entertained by movies."