Jinni: A new movie recommendation engine

Jinni is a new search and recommendation engine for movies and TV shows whose aim is to help viewers find stuff they will like.

I signed up and will give it a go, after all the idea is a good one.

Apart from ‘what is your favourite film?’, the question I’m most frequently asked is something like:

What’s a good film I should see?

This is a trickier question than it might seem, because although I have my views on what’s good, my taste isn’t always going to chime in with who’s asking me.

Sites like this and Flixster appear to offer a solution to the ‘what should I see’ problem but the main drawback is that it is a pain to rate lots of films.

Obviously, the more you rate the better the recommendations will be (or that’s the theory) but I don’t know if a scientific approach always works best.

Just because on film is like another (e.g. same genre or director) doesn’t mean it will always have the same effect on the viewer.

I think what people crave is a film that hits the sweet spot, in other words a special movie that ticks a lot of boxes all at once.

But that is pretty hard to calculate, no matter how much data you have.