5 ms·

MovieLens – Non-Commercial, Personalized Movie Recommendation System

67 points by wang42 11y ago

nobody_nowhere 11y ago
Oh wow, blast from the past. I remember rating hundreds of movies on this back when collaborative filtering was fresh and new...
- pinko 11y ago
  Just signed in for the first time in years... the bulk of my ratings were done in 2002!
cryowaffle 11y ago
Neat, I worked on this project while at the U of M under the instruction of now passed John Riedl.
- aaronbrethorst 11y ago
  Shit, I hadn't heard that John Riedl died. I'm really sorry to hear it. I never had a chance to take a class with him, but Professors Konstan and Terveen were incredibly influential for me.
  - dmoy 11y ago
    Riedl is the reason I have my job :( I would not be where I am without him.
pen2l 11y ago
Despite there being so many of these sites, most of them kind of fail for me. For instance... last night I was wanting to watch a movie, but the kids needed to watch it too (as they can't be left unattended with me watching a movie in the other room :)). So I went off on a search for a movie to watch... with a rating filter -- it needed to be either G or PG. Nothing. No recommendation site, Netflix, or anything let me filter movies/shows this way. Yes, you have the 'Kids' section on Netflix, but most of the stuff there is deathly boring for adults, I was hoping for something good for both kids and adults. I ended up not watching anything.
- KerrM 11y ago
  If you have an iPad I made an app called Dejavu that might be able to help, you can filter by genre and year of release, and if you think it would be good I could potentially add filtering by rating. Check it out :) I'd love to get some feedback https://itunes.apple.com/app/id914369680 https://itunes.apple.com/app/id914369680
- pen2l 11y ago
  KerrM: alright, thanks, I'll check it out. p.s.: your account is shadowbanned
- jmilloy 11y ago
  This site has a mpaa rating filter. Have you found it yet?
- hammock 11y ago
  Jinni let you do this. However, it looks like theyve pivoted and their movie reco engine is not available anymore.
- ddeck 11y ago
  Although not a personal recommendation site, instantwatcher.com allows you to filter Netflix titles by rating and sort by a lot of other useful criteria such as production year, rotten tomato rating etc.
dmix 11y ago
This looks interesting, but I'm always sad to see consumer web apps still requiring you to sign up before you can try it out. Missing out on so many potential users. 1) sell the product then 2) ask for the customers info
- prawn 11y ago
  Agree. If there was a way to try it out without creating an account, I probably would. As it is, there is no chance unless for months I consistently hear from friends "You have to try MovieLens - it's brilliant." And I've never heard about it, so I close the tab.
  - praveenkannan 11y ago
    Movielens is non-commercial product. Its emerged and maintained as a product of Grouplens Research group. They may not have put effort to integrate with some obvious SSO but its definitely worth a try. P.S. I am biased because I have worked in Grouplens research lab for a short time and I have loved interacting with all the students and professors there.
    - prawn 11y ago
      Yes, I'm aware of the background, but surely if they want people to use it, they should take the best route to achieving that? Or if it's a learning experience, learn part of the reality about getting people to use a service? Otherwise, how many of us look over the page and then walk away?
- nathancahill 11y ago
  What would you expect to try out without an account? The whole point is using your personal ratings of movies get new recommendations. In most cases, I'd wholeheartedly agree with you, but in this case, the experience is pretty tightly tied to having an account.
  - dangson 11y ago
KerrM 11y ago
Very cool, I wish they had a public API to query!
posborne 11y ago
Here's the dataset they use. I have used this as part of developing and testing the fitness of recommender systems in the past: http://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/ http://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/ This predates some of my more recent work with the grouplens database, but here is a parser I put together for the data awhile back: https://github.com/posborne/mlcollection/blob/master/mlcollection/datasets/movielens/movielensparser.py https://github.com/posborne/mlcollection/blob/master/mlcolle...
MichaelGG 11y ago
Proof that Netflix doesn't need all that effort to deliver a laggy, annoying, UI. Seriously, the core functionality is essentially the same. MovieLens seems like it might replace Netflix for me. Not-terrible recommendations and a decent UI. Though I've only been using it a few days so we'll see, but it can barely end up worse than Netflix eh?
RodericDay 11y ago
I'm torn. On the one hand, I just spent a few minutes rating about 100 films, and the quality of the recommendations is so much better than Netflix's garbage that it's mindblowing. As in, we've spent half an hour browsing Netflix trying to find something to watch and settling for something meh, whereas here I have a full page of recs with 5 minutes input. On the other hand, I don't know if I'm very impressed with anything yet, the recommendations seem obvious. It's more like a neat visual collection manager, I'm not sure I "feel" anything crazy going on in the background beyond what looking at IMDb best-of lists would produce. In other words, the value seems to be in the Netflix-ish "cover collection" display, unconstrained by the limits of their selection.
ivank 11y ago
http://criticker.com/ http://criticker.com/ is a good alternative. For each movie, it shows you ratings from users sorted by their rating-similarity to you. I've found it really helpful to see all the ratings in addition to getting a predicted rating. I often use the individual ratings to figure out whether a movie is in the cluster of what people-like-me watch, and also to see whether opinion is unanimous or divisive.
- amazon_not 11y ago
  It might be great, but personally I don't like the UI. The throwback layout, poor spacing and positioning spiced with non-relevant and distracting ads just put me off. But then again that's just me, I bet somebody loves it. I do however take issue with numerical scoring that is then changed to a value based word score upon submission. People are notoriously bad at scoring things on a 0-100 scale. It also begs the question why there is 0-100 scale when a non-disclosed word score is applied anyway. The final nail in the coffin was that they lost my activation email and won't let me in without it. To add insult to injury there isn't an option to resend the email. The only way to proceed is to email support and wait upon their indulgence. NEXT!
  - ivank 11y ago
    Yes, it's imperfect and a little ugly. > then changed to a value based word score upon submission Your numerical score is still there. You can pretty much totally ignore the descriptors and think of the tiers T1-T10 as percentiles. > begs the question why there is 0-100 scale This lets you rate to any granularity you like to precisely order your movies. After you have a large number of rated movies, you might want to tweak the scores to bump a movie into a higher or lower tier. Also, if you already have ratings in imdb, you can import them with http://www.criticker.com/?im http://www.criticker.com/?im
scottmcdot 11y ago
Any way I can upload my IMDB ratings .csv to this?
grandalf 11y ago
this has been one of my favorite sites for years.
Harelin 11y ago
Something like this would be useful if you could cross-reference your recommendations with others. If I have a set of recommended movies, tell me which movies are also recommended to members of my family, so that we can find the one we are most likely to all enjoy.
nathanb 11y ago
I rated 43 films, then selected "Top Picks for You" and got 0 results. So I decided to not watch a movie and instead go for a walk. Which turned out to be exactly what I needed. Five stars.
- rancur 11y ago
  already-released-film is one of the markets where I would have little reason to distrust the for-profit model. until I questioned that trust.
- wang42 11y ago
  Have you tried selecting the "warrior" mode? The same thing happened to me but after I selected "warrior" mode, recommendations popped up. Edit: It seems that the "wizard" mode is updated daily or so.
  - amazon_not 11y ago
    Same here. The wizard mode seems broken. As soon as I rated more than a handful of movies it started showing 0 recomendations.
    - wang42 11y ago
      It seems that recommendations by the "wizard" mode are updated daily or so. I signed up yesterday and got nothing with the wizard mode. It starts to show promising results just now I checked.
      - amazon_not 11y ago
        You'd think that they wouldn't make it the default mode then. Or at least warn the user. Regardless what the root cause is the end result is that it's broken from a user perspective.
fayimora 11y ago
I can't seem to get past the captcha :( Anyone else?
- wang42 11y ago
  Me too. It seems to depend on browser. I did not pass on Chrome but pass after switching to Safari.
  - fayimora 11y ago
    Very weird! I just tried in Safari and all I had to do was tick a checkbox as opposed to identifying pancakes and street signs in Chrome.

67 points by wang42 11y ago

Oh wow, blast from the past. I remember rating hundreds of movies on this back when collaborative filtering was fresh and new...

pinko 11y ago
Just signed in for the first time in years... the bulk of my ratings were done in 2002!

cryowaffle 11y ago

Neat, I worked on this project while at the U of M under the instruction of now passed John Riedl.

aaronbrethorst 11y ago
Shit, I hadn't heard that John Riedl died. I'm really sorry to hear it. I never had a chance to take a class with him, but Professors Konstan and Terveen were incredibly influential for me.
- dmoy 11y ago
  Riedl is the reason I have my job :( I would not be where I am without him.

pen2l 11y ago

Despite there being so many of these sites, most of them kind of fail for me. For instance... last night I was wanting to watch a movie, but the kids needed to watch it too (as they can't be left unattended with me watching a movie in the other room :)). So I went off on a search for a movie to watch... with a rating filter -- it needed to be either G or PG. Nothing. No recommendation site, Netflix, or anything let me filter movies/shows this way. Yes, you have the 'Kids' section on Netflix, but most of the stuff there is deathly boring for adults, I was hoping for something good for both kids and adults. I ended up not watching anything.

KerrM 11y ago
If you have an iPad I made an app called Dejavu that might be able to help, you can filter by genre and year of release, and if you think it would be good I could potentially add filtering by rating. Check it out :) I'd love to get some feedback https://itunes.apple.com/app/id914369680 https://itunes.apple.com/app/id914369680
pen2l 11y ago
KerrM: alright, thanks, I'll check it out. p.s.: your account is shadowbanned
jmilloy 11y ago
This site has a mpaa rating filter. Have you found it yet?
hammock 11y ago
Jinni let you do this. However, it looks like theyve pivoted and their movie reco engine is not available anymore.
ddeck 11y ago
Although not a personal recommendation site, instantwatcher.com allows you to filter Netflix titles by rating and sort by a lot of other useful criteria such as production year, rotten tomato rating etc.

dmix 11y ago

This looks interesting, but I'm always sad to see consumer web apps still requiring you to sign up before you can try it out. Missing out on so many potential users. 1) sell the product then 2) ask for the customers info

prawn 11y ago
Agree. If there was a way to try it out without creating an account, I probably would. As it is, there is no chance unless for months I consistently hear from friends "You have to try MovieLens - it's brilliant." And I've never heard about it, so I close the tab.
- praveenkannan 11y ago
  Movielens is non-commercial product. Its emerged and maintained as a product of Grouplens Research group. They may not have put effort to integrate with some obvious SSO but its definitely worth a try. P.S. I am biased because I have worked in Grouplens research lab for a short time and I have loved interacting with all the students and professors there.
  - prawn 11y ago
    Yes, I'm aware of the background, but surely if they want people to use it, they should take the best route to achieving that? Or if it's a learning experience, learn part of the reality about getting people to use a service? Otherwise, how many of us look over the page and then walk away?
nathancahill 11y ago
What would you expect to try out without an account? The whole point is using your personal ratings of movies get new recommendations. In most cases, I'd wholeheartedly agree with you, but in this case, the experience is pretty tightly tied to having an account.
- dangson 11y ago

KerrM 11y ago

Very cool, I wish they had a public API to query!

posborne 11y ago

Here's the dataset they use. I have used this as part of developing and testing the fitness of recommender systems in the past: http://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/ http://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/ This predates some of my more recent work with the grouplens database, but here is a parser I put together for the data awhile back: https://github.com/posborne/mlcollection/blob/master/mlcollection/datasets/movielens/movielensparser.py https://github.com/posborne/mlcollection/blob/master/mlcolle...

MichaelGG 11y ago

Proof that Netflix doesn't need all that effort to deliver a laggy, annoying, UI. Seriously, the core functionality is essentially the same. MovieLens seems like it might replace Netflix for me. Not-terrible recommendations and a decent UI. Though I've only been using it a few days so we'll see, but it can barely end up worse than Netflix eh?

RodericDay 11y ago

I'm torn. On the one hand, I just spent a few minutes rating about 100 films, and the quality of the recommendations is so much better than Netflix's garbage that it's mindblowing. As in, we've spent half an hour browsing Netflix trying to find something to watch and settling for something meh, whereas here I have a full page of recs with 5 minutes input. On the other hand, I don't know if I'm very impressed with anything yet, the recommendations seem obvious. It's more like a neat visual collection manager, I'm not sure I "feel" anything crazy going on in the background beyond what looking at IMDb best-of lists would produce. In other words, the value seems to be in the Netflix-ish "cover collection" display, unconstrained by the limits of their selection.

ivank 11y ago

http://criticker.com/ http://criticker.com/ is a good alternative. For each movie, it shows you ratings from users sorted by their rating-similarity to you. I've found it really helpful to see all the ratings in addition to getting a predicted rating. I often use the individual ratings to figure out whether a movie is in the cluster of what people-like-me watch, and also to see whether opinion is unanimous or divisive.

amazon_not 11y ago
It might be great, but personally I don't like the UI. The throwback layout, poor spacing and positioning spiced with non-relevant and distracting ads just put me off. But then again that's just me, I bet somebody loves it. I do however take issue with numerical scoring that is then changed to a value based word score upon submission. People are notoriously bad at scoring things on a 0-100 scale. It also begs the question why there is 0-100 scale when a non-disclosed word score is applied anyway. The final nail in the coffin was that they lost my activation email and won't let me in without it. To add insult to injury there isn't an option to resend the email. The only way to proceed is to email support and wait upon their indulgence. NEXT!
- ivank 11y ago
  Yes, it's imperfect and a little ugly. > then changed to a value based word score upon submission Your numerical score is still there. You can pretty much totally ignore the descriptors and think of the tiers T1-T10 as percentiles. > begs the question why there is 0-100 scale This lets you rate to any granularity you like to precisely order your movies. After you have a large number of rated movies, you might want to tweak the scores to bump a movie into a higher or lower tier. Also, if you already have ratings in imdb, you can import them with http://www.criticker.com/?im http://www.criticker.com/?im

scottmcdot 11y ago

Any way I can upload my IMDB ratings .csv to this?

grandalf 11y ago

this has been one of my favorite sites for years.

Harelin 11y ago

Something like this would be useful if you could cross-reference your recommendations with others. If I have a set of recommended movies, tell me which movies are also recommended to members of my family, so that we can find the one we are most likely to all enjoy.

nathanb 11y ago

I rated 43 films, then selected "Top Picks for You" and got 0 results. So I decided to not watch a movie and instead go for a walk. Which turned out to be exactly what I needed. Five stars.

rancur 11y ago
already-released-film is one of the markets where I would have little reason to distrust the for-profit model. until I questioned that trust.
wang42 11y ago
Have you tried selecting the "warrior" mode? The same thing happened to me but after I selected "warrior" mode, recommendations popped up. Edit: It seems that the "wizard" mode is updated daily or so.
- amazon_not 11y ago
  Same here. The wizard mode seems broken. As soon as I rated more than a handful of movies it started showing 0 recomendations.
  - wang42 11y ago
    It seems that recommendations by the "wizard" mode are updated daily or so. I signed up yesterday and got nothing with the wizard mode. It starts to show promising results just now I checked.
    - amazon_not 11y ago
      You'd think that they wouldn't make it the default mode then. Or at least warn the user. Regardless what the root cause is the end result is that it's broken from a user perspective.

fayimora 11y ago

I can't seem to get past the captcha :( Anyone else?

wang42 11y ago
Me too. It seems to depend on browser. I did not pass on Chrome but pass after switching to Safari.
- fayimora 11y ago
  Very weird! I just tried in Safari and all I had to do was tick a checkbox as opposed to identifying pancakes and street signs in Chrome.