[ulrikrasmussen]

Not if there literally is nothing that matches your query. There is a tendency for services to be scared of ever returning nothing, and instead they will return things that they think are related to your query but really aren't.

Example: If you search for a specific movie title on Netflix but they don't have it, then they will give you a list of movies that they think are similar to the one you searched for. That is because their database actually knows about the movie and therefore can find links to other vaguely related stuff, e.g. movies made by the same director, with a similar theme, etc. But if I search for a specific title, then none of this is what I want, and I don't want to spend the extra 10-20 seconds scrolling through the list to realize that they actually don't have what I want. This is clearly a search experience which is optimized for maximizing engagement rather than user experience because a small minority will end up watching something from the garbage results while the majority will waste their time and be burdened by extra cognitive load. Shareholders are happy, users suffer.

[10729287]

>Example: If you search for a specific movie title on Netflix but they don't have it, then they will give you a list of movies that they think are similar to the one you searched for.

I absolutely hated that when I was a subscriber. That 1/4 of seconds of believing the search will succeed, just to give me the subpar copycat of the movie I was looking for.

[jorvi]

> But if I search for a specific title, then none of this is what I want, and I don't want to spend the extra 10-20 seconds scrolling through the list to realize that they actually don't have what I want.

This has never been the case. If it can’t find your title, it’ll display “titles similar to”, right at the head part of your search. No 20 seconds of confirmation needed.

I actually prefer Netflix’ way because if I search for “Demolition Man” and they don’t have it, it might be that I’m in the mood for any <2000s action schlok, and who says I already know about “Escape From New York”?

[mewpmewp2]

I just tried searching in browser and Netflix says nothing like "titles similar to".

I searched for "Ted Lasso".

It has grey text "More to explore:", white text "Ted Lasso" and then thumbnail list of different shows, and it's literally just thumbnails, you can't even Ctrl + F and you have to read all the titles in different colored and stylised fonts.

It's as if it is intentionally built in such a way to make it hard to understand that it's really not there.

https://imgur.com/vgohSVP

Edit:

And in TV it says nothing, just gives you the thumbnails and since it takes longer to type you must check after each character whether one of the thumbnails happens to be what you are searching for.

[OwseiWT]

I'm not home rn so I can't test it, but I'm quite sure that netflix says something like "we don't have X, these titles are similar" or smth like that. Maybe I just have an old version in my TV idk.

[freedomben]

I've seen both. Sometimes it says it doesn't have it, other times it just displays results like it does have it even though it doesn't. You might be onto something, it's probably the difference between the web interface and app interface (on various devices).

[mewpmewp2]

My LG tv with webOS also doesn't give any indication that the title does not exist.

[codetrotter]

> There is a tendency for services to be scared of ever returning nothing, and instead they will return things that they think are related to your query but really aren't.

With Netflix I assume they use data from IMDb for finding similar movies.

But one platform having particularly surprising ability to find “similar” things is AliExpress.

On AliExpress if you search for a brand and model of something without saying what it is, AliExpress is still sometimes able to know what kind of thing you are looking for and show similar products from other brands. And I’ve been wondering how they do that.

Maybe AliExpress has a big database of products that they scrape from the internet and classify, even for brands and models that have never been on AliExpress.

Or they could be able to do it based on similar queries that people made in the past where someone for example included extra keywords about what they were looking for. Or those people first having searched for a brand name and model and then made subsequent searches for more generic descriptions of what they looked for.

Or sellers could be including names of brands and models for products that are similar in the description or other input fields for metadata for their listings.