Your Search Results May Vary

I was searching for Friday’s movie (well, short, but never mind) on Just Watch, and you know, I’m fine with the fact that, sometimes, movies just aren’t available. I’m even to a certain extent okay with the system’s never having heard of them, though I’ll admit I resent it when it’s a movie from my actual adulthood starring people you’ve heard of. What always gets me is the suggestions a lot of algorithms come up with instead. Seldom does it fully make sense; often, it doesn’t make even a little sense.

Part of the problem, I suppose, is that few search programs are willing to say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Disney+ does, though of course this isn’t one of the options featuring the characters I’ll be discussing Friday that are on the service. Most other companies would rather suggest something, anything else in the hopes that you’ll stick around and watch one of them instead. And if you’re searching for something with a highly specific combination of words, the algorithms are at a loss. Which means it’s increasingly difficult to figure out what it does suggest.

For all Netflix completely fails to promote its own productions, what it used to do when it hadn’t heard of what I was looking for was suggest a Netflix original instead. I’m not sure if it still does that or not; I haven’t searched Netflix for anything obscure in a long time. But I’d be searching, say, Elmer Gantry or La Chienne, and Netflix would respond, “But had you considered House of Cards?” Which I had, but which was manifestly not what I was looking for. It managed to be both amusing and frustrating.

But at least I understood it. Yes, it was objectively silly and wrong, but there was a certain logic there. Maybe I didn’t want to watch their original thing, whatever they were recommending, or at least didn’t want to watch it then, but they wanted me to. And I might be weak-minded enough to forget that I was in fact looking for a French movie from the 1930s. (Who does that anyway?) It was annoying, but at least it was annoying in an understandable way.

Meanwhile, I am left wondering what exact combination of words I typed into Just Watch to bring up a Qanon video, a slew of Fast and Furious movies—including a 1954 one written by Roger Corman—and Yojimbo. This sort of thing is why I’m never going to trust large language models unless things get a hell of a lot better. I can’t even find a freakin’ Disney short without also having a TLC production called 90 Day: Hunt For Love turn up. What’s so intelligent about that?