MovieLens: Non-commercial, personalized movie recommendations

I didn’t make it so I’m not entirely sure how they’re different but I’ll do my best to describe how it works. That being said, so far it’s been the most accurate movie recommendation service I’ve ever used.

It seems like the two recommendation engines are called the Warrior and the other is called the Wizard and you can choose between them.

The Warrior seems good at finding movies that are similar to each other that you may like. Not a whole lot of surprises in terms of what it thinks you may like. And for the longest time this is what I used because intuitively it felt right. “These are the movies I should like.”

The Wizard uses something called singular value decomposition and it seems much better at capturing the essence of a movie; the qualities you may like that may not be readily apparent in just the genre or overall similarity between movies. But it may offer movies it thinks you like that you didn’t expect.

For that reason I didn’t use the Wizard for the longest time but once I started watching a few movies it recommended I realized it actually knew my preferences better than what I thought.

It’s by no means perfect but it’s overturned my intuitions a couple times for what I thought I would enjoy.

Makes finding interesting movies fairly easy.

I also like that it’s so minimalistic. Let’s me just focus on finding the next great movie.

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