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Comment by eterevsky | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if you were looking for the movie.

The you'd use a different search engine. Why does everything have to be a Swiss Army knife?

Or you could just search for 'rome movie'. Though for more complex disambiguation you would need to resort to, e.g. schema.org descriptions (which are supported by most search engines, and the foundation for most "smart" search result snippets).

That's a fair point. This engine would be useful if you need grep over internet (by without regexes), i.e. when you want to find the exact phrases. But that's a relatively narrow use case.

I tend to prefer Wikipedia for movies. The exception is actor headshots if I'm trying to identify someone, which Wikipedia lacks for licensing reasons, but otherwise Wikipedia tends to be better than IMDB for most needs. Wikipedia has an IMDB link on every article anyway.

Another need I guess might be reviews, for which RT or MC are better than IMDB: not sure if either of those two will fare better than IMDB in this search engine but again Wiki has links out (in addition to good reception summaries)

For me, imdb was much better when they had user comments/discussion.

I never even posted on it myself, but browsing the discussions one could learn all sorts of trivia, inside info, speculation, etc about each movie.

Since they (inexplicably) killed that feature, I rarely even visit anymore. Your right, for many purposes wikipedia is better, especially for TV series episode lists with summaries.

IMDB management thought it was their brilliant editorial work that drew people to their site. Morons. It was the comments all along. Of course they also believed they could create gravity-free zones by sheer force of executive will (and maybe still do).

Especially for old and lesser known movies, the discussion board for the movie was a brilliant addition that could give the movie an extra dimension. Context is very important in order to understand, and ulitmately enjoy something.

I think they removed it in part because new movies, like star wars and superhero movies, had alot of negative activity.

I find IMDb to be more convenient than RT/MC/Wikipedia for finding release dates of movies - nearly every other website lists only the American release date, maybe one or two others if the movie was disproportionately popular in certain regions.

Imagine including the search term "movie".

That doesn't do anything useful.

?q=imdb.com:fall of the roman empire

!imdb

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