Lots of bad recommendation systems out there, to be sure, but Netflix's strikes me as one of the better (best?) implementations. If I search for a particular title, it's usually at the top (or close to, with fuzzier search terms), whereas when they don't have what I'm looking for (happens a lot, their library is pretty small where I live) their recommendations are at least pretty similar to what I'm looking for. Compared to comparable solutions with dumb search, it's a much better experience.

But I agree insofar as botched recommenders that you can't circumvent easily are the absolute worst UX.