There are no lack of websites to do this, in fact Netflix currently has one of the best recommendation engines, but unfortunately is only available for people in the US.

A couple of other notables come up, including Movielens, Flixter and Criticker. However by far the best service I’ve discovered is Jinni, a new movie recommendation engine in public beta.

I really won’t go into too much detail about the site, I suggest you go sign up yourself, but I will say this; Jinni provides the most useful recommendation service I’ve ever used and is also unique in inclusion of the long tail into the system. Many services notoriously suffer from simply sending people to the same popular movies which in turn makes them more popular and more likely to be recommended. On Jinni you’ll get the popular, the obscure and the unlikely.

The engine is based around the Movie Genome, a similar idea to the Music Genome Project used by Pandora.

“Jinni’s social search-and-recommendation engine uses our Movie Genome, a big, ongoing project with the Jinni community to describe video more complexly. Using proprietary technology, a Jinni search takes you inside plot elements, atmosphere, and more – for search that reflects how we think and talk about movies”

Because Jinni is using a much richer set of data than the recommendation system at Netflix, it can consequently create much better results and even solve the problems Netflix has with predicting indie if people will like certain indie movies like Napoleon Dynamite.

Also, if you are a big Netflix user – Jinni integrates well with the service including the importing of Netflix data and ratings and the ability to add a movie from Jinni to your Netflix account.

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Taste Kid (via Genbeta) concentrates on books, movies and music which is something that I have not seen that often yet. Normally it’s only one of the three and not all of them. The website consists of a form where the user can enter something that he likes that relates to books, music or movies. This can be an artist or a name of a product.

Taste Kid will then pull data from the database and display recommendations based on the user’s input. If you enter 24 (the TV series) for example you get recommendations for Lost and The Office among others.

One interesting aspect of the website is that you do get recommendations for books and music as well if you entered for example a movie title. This does not happen all of the time though.

A brief description (taken from Wikipedia mostly it seems) is available for many items that are mentioned on the website and the site even embeds Youtube videos when available which is great to get a first impression of that recommendation.

Another interesting aspect of Taste Kid is that the website is not commercial (yet). You do not find links to online stores where you can buy the media directly. As of now it’s just a way to receive recommendations that include previews.

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