Google Adds Movie Special Syntax

Google keeps it going with the specialty syntax with a new offering: movie information.

This isn't really a special syntax in the strictest sense of the word; you don't have to use a single word. Instead if you use the word showtimes or movies, you can get movie-specific information.

Several different levels of information are available:

-- General location information -- if you search for the word movie and then a zip code, or movie and a city and state, you can get information about what's playing in those areas. Try movie:90210 or movie:houston tx . Information from the listings includes movie theatre (you can group by movie theatre or group by movie name) movie name, genre, and length, links to reviews and IMBD information (IMDB is owned by Amazon; this is an interesting little vector) and show times.

-- Specific movies locally -- Use the keyword movie the movie name, and a zip code, and you can get information about movies in local areas. Try searching for movie:incredibles 90210 . If the movie for which you're searching is not playing in the area in which you're searching, your search will be treated as a keyword search, which brings us to:

-- Keyword searching. You can also use the movie syntax with general keyword searches. Doing a search like movie:magnificent ambersons finds information about several different movies, including The Magnificent Ambersons, Citizen Kane, and Visions of Light. Information is broken out by movie and include pointers to reviews and information about the movies. (And the bottom of the page states "No movie critics were harmed or even used in the making of this page." Oh boy! WHIMSY!)

That's all very nice. However, what really draws my attention on the keyword search results page is that you can sort it by date. Google Groups pages -- that is, pages drawn from Usenet -- have dates associated with them; not a big surprise. What is a surprise is that other Web pages have dates associated with them, including articles from the BBC, Chicago Sun-Times, and Epinions. Sun-Times and BBC I could understand, since the URLs include the date, but I'm kind of surprised about Epinions. Maybe Google's making good way on delineating Web content information without delving into RSS.

There's a good thing and an annoying thing about this new movie search. The annoying thing is that the search has stop words. WHY??? If I can search Google's eight-billion Web pages for the word "the" (and you can; you'll get about eight billion results) Why why why why WHY can't I search a presumably MUCH smaller pool of information with the word THE?

Here's my beef: There's a movie out called "What the #$*! Do We Know!?", but it's also known as "What the Bleep Do We Know!?" (by credible sources; the first title is how it's listed on IMBD, while the second title is how it's listed on Amazon. Since both those resources are the same company, you can understand my confusion.) Anyway, I didn't know which title would work on Amazon, but when I tried searching for movies:what the I got no answers because both those words are apparently stop words. (movies:"what the" worked fine.)

On the other hand the wildcard syntax works with this search, so the search movie:"what the * do we know" worked fine and gave me information about, as Google lists it, "What the #$*! Do We Know!?"

You can take this search with you as well. Google has made this one of the things that you can access from your cell phone. Send a text message to the shortcode 46645 and use the general location information syntax (movie:10015) or specific title syntax (movie:incredibles 90210).

I'm happy to see this available, as I did some experimenting with Google movie reviews a long time ago and had fun playing with Google's vast amount of movie information (see my extremely basic and pathetic next to Google's offering Moogle: http://www.researchbuzz.org/moogle.shtml ).

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