New Feature: Similar Titles

The Blu-ray.com team is happy to announce another site upgrade, this time a similar titles suggestions/recommendations feature has been added to the bottom of all Blu-ray profiles/entries. This is the first version of the Similar Titles feature, so all suggested titles won't be ideal, but we still think the suggestions are better than most other sites', including IMDB. The Similar Titles feature/system is a variant of an artificial neural network and will provide better and better suggestions over time (self-learning). Due to complexity it is not updated in real-time, but fairly often.

What is it good for?

The Similar Titles feature is good for especially two things:

• If you like a specific title it will give you suggestions of similar titles that you probably would like as well.
• If you haven't seen a movie yet but you are considering seeing it, the Similar Titles feature should come in handy and give you a good idea of what to expect from the movie/what type of movie it is, and should help your decision if you should see/buy the movie or not.

How to use it

• The best way to use the Similar Titles feature is to browse around a lot. Click on a similar title and then check out that title's Similar Titles cloud. Continue jumping around and you will be taken in the direction of the last choice. Depending on your current mood and what type of movies you are into, you will be drawn in that direction and end up in different interesting spots. It should be pretty much impossible to not find any new interesting movies.
• The title displayed first is the title that has been calculated to have the highest similarity, the title displayed last has the least similarity. For more obscure titles the similar titles displayed last will probably not be reliable and differ quite a lot, however, for more mainstream titles pretty much all similar titles should be relevant.
• If you have a fairly good Internet connection, we recommend that you click on "Show more titles" to display six rows of similar titles instead of just two, to get more suggestions. Keep in mind though that those titles are less similar but can still be very good, especially for mainstream titles.

Things to keep in mind

• Suggestions for newly released titles are much more unreliable than older titles since the system has had less time to learn about the title. Unreleased titles are the most unreliable.
• Suggestions for obscure- and highly unique titles will be more unreliable than mainstream titles. Some titles are very unique and good suggestions of similar titles simply can't be made.
• As there are more and more Blu-ray titles being released overall- and more information being added every day to Blu-ray.com, the suggestions will become increasingly better.
• The Similar Titles feature currently only calculates similarity, "good" movies aren't given priority over "bad" movies, so it might suggest bad titles that you should avoid (but should be easy to identify and discard anyway).
• If you are looking at a US release, you will only get suggestions for other US releases. Same for UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, France etc. If you aren't getting good suggestions for a title for a specific country, we suggest you check the corresponding US entry for suggestions instead since US has the most releases and is more likely to produce better suggestions.
• The system is "living" and the similar titles will jump around (especially for unstable/new titles) as better suggestions are calculated.

As mentioned, this is the first public version of the system and we will continue to develop it and the site to make it better. We have started a dedicated Similar Titles feedback thread where you can report about (obvious) anomalies you find related to the Similar Titles feature