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Comment by tragomaskhalos | Hacker News Reader

Take IMDB - in the early 90's it was a fun little database hosted at the University of Cardiff, obviously limited content-wise but responsiveness was certainly not an issue. Fast forward to today and the modern behemoth it has become is essentially unusable (at least on my tablet) for quick enquiries, what with all the ads/video whatnot clogging up the homepage plus the utterly borked predictive search textbox - eurgh.

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https://www.imdb.com/interfaces/

> Subsets of IMDb data are available for access to customers for personal and non-commercial use. You can hold local copies of this data, and it is subject to our terms and conditions. Please refer to the Non-Commercial Licensing and copyright/license and verify compliance.

> The dataset files can be accessed and downloaded from https://datasets.imdbws.com/. The data is refreshed daily.

> Each dataset is contained in a gzipped, tab-separated-values (TSV) formatted file in the UTF-8 character set. The first line in each file contains headers that describe what is in each column. A ‘\N’ is used to denote that a particular field is missing or null for that title/name. The available datasets are as follows: [...]

Good to know—I never would have found this though as I’d expect a web database to work as such (e.g. not require me to download and parse the database in Excel). On the usability front it doesn’t help.

I’d wager the license does not permit republishing the data on the web using better UX paradigms either—though I am too lazy to read through the fine print.

Ugh yes perfect example—every time I go there nowadays I can’t find anything. Often I would try to find an actor/director’s filmography but it takes a good 20 seconds to find the tiny links squeezed between the ads!

Not to mention that the movie ratings are derived from fake reviews, and you have to look at the distribution of individual user reviews to gauge if they are genuine and decide if the movie is worth watching. If its lots of 1 and 10 ratings, the movie is probably crap. Many 6-8 ratings and you're good to go. The nice thing for bad movies is that there's always a low-rating review which is a great read that gives you a good laugh.

I always use Google, no need to navigate IMDB home: https://www.google.com/search?&q=harrison+ford+filmography+i...

You also get adverts before you watch trailers (but trailers are ads!) and you can't watch the trailers full screen because if you rotate your phone it keeps the video small and puts lots of distracting text next to it.

Trailers are ads they don't make money from. It's not about the media being ads, it's about if the media makes them money.

They must be trying to maximize some bounce rate metric. I had to make a bookmarklet just to do the simplest of tasks because I can never see the user reviews scrolling the title's page.

  javascript:(function(){ window.location = window.location+'reviews?sort=userRating&dir=asc&ratingFilter=0' })()

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