Google Adds Movie Search
Google has added a new search operator, “movie:”, that gives you results of movie titles with reviews of those movies. The results page is very informative. This page, for “The Matrix“, shows the movies listed and their aggregate ratings (naturally, the first Matrix is rated better than the sequels), with snippets of reviews. What’s cool is that you can search for more than movie titles. You can search for an actor (like Tom Cruise) and get movies he appeared in, or movie genres, or even quotes.
Using the sorting method, you can then get the best reviewed horror film, or Jim Carrey’s most recent film. A feature that needs to be added: sorting in the other direction, so you can get the oldest film, as opposed to the newest one (which is less useful). The simplest way to get to this engine is to type movie: in your Google Search box, or visit www.google.com/reviews?q=movie.
You can also use Google’s movie operator to see what movie are playing in your area. Just type “movie:” and your zip code (or city, state) and you’ll get a page with the closest theatres, movies and showtimes. You can also “Group by movie”, to see each movie and all the places it is playing in your area. You can click on the times and will be directed to movietickets.com to buy a ticket. Movie showtimes are also available at Google SMS, 46645 on your cell phone.
Finally, at the bottom of every movie review page, a nice, Google-like disclaimer:
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.
(via the Google Blog)
I really think this is a great feature, but my biggest gripe is that searches for ‘horror’ (like in your example above) do NOT find all the horror-related movies, simply the movies who have a review which mentions the word ‘horror’ (or has a review title with the word ‘horror’ in it, or the title of the movie has the word ‘horror’ in it). This makes the results rather misleading and begs for different operators (”genre:, director:, actor:, year:”?)
So, it’s really up to the review authors to provide information (such as ‘Tom Cruise’, ‘red pill blue pill’) about the movies, which can be both bad and good. The bad is the example above - the good is, for example, a search for ‘Lawrence of Arabia brings up a selection of movies whose reviewers compared their movie to Lawrence of Arabia. If you look at the results you can immediately see some other, excellent, David Lean films and a variety of “epic” films, much akin to this one. I feel that the this movie search engine has a lot of potential, we’ll just see how it plays out.
On another note, the first thing that I thought of when seeing this was ‘Uh oh, Metacritic is in trouble.’ I can only hope that Google is going to start doing more review searches, in addition to their product and movie reviews.
Comment by John Resig | February 23, 2005
This is one of those incredible features that sets google apart. My wife and I are always looking up showtimes online. It usually takes us 3-6 clicks to find what we’re looking for. Now, we will be able to find it with no more than 2 (one to get to google, on to search).
Comment by Nicholas | February 24, 2005
[…] or movie: actor name for a list of the movies that actor has been in with reviews. Thanks Inside Google. Permalink | Trackback url | Cosmos | Bl […]
Pingback by Looking For A Movie? | John Hesch | June 13, 2005
[…] U.S. users have had this feature since February. Unlike other Google services, simple translation won’t suffice for expanding it to more countries, since movie listing data has to be aquired first. Anyway, its a good service, so enjoy! […]
Pingback by » Google Adds Movie Showtimes For The UK InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel | August 31, 2005
[…] Do any search on Google with “review:” in it and you get a 503 error. Search for “review:“, “review: spider-man 3“, or “google review:“, doesn’t matter, it just fails. What could it mean? Is there some sort of error in Google, or are they revamping/expanding their movie review aggregation feature? Only ridiculous and unfounded speculation will find an answer. […]
Pingback by » Google Review Error, Or New Feature? » InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel | May 6, 2007