Internet Movie Database Offers Keywords Analyzer

If you were to ask me to name the top ten Internet sites I use a lot more than I think I would, the Internet Movie Database would come up near the top. Now they're offering a new tool for even more movie exploration -- the Movie Keywords Analyzer (MoKA), available at http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Keywords/.

It's described as "MoKA lets you find titles that have a particular keyword and then presents a tally of all keywords from the titles that matched your initial keyword set." which sounds a little like a clustering engine to me. You can browse all the keywords alphabetically, but where the fun in that? More fun to search them.

A guy I work with has a thing about zombies, so I'll start my keyword search with zombie. MoKA actually gives me several sets of results. There's the exact match, which has a list of 536 results. There's the partial matches (including zombie-child, zombie-presidents, and the intriguing zombie-love.) Then there's the keyword approximate matches, where it starts getting surreal. Zombification? Okay. Flesh-eating-zombies? If you must. But sombrero? Ambient? Combine Harvester?

Clicking on a keyword or partial keyword match gives you more than just related movie titles, but also a tag cloud for that title list. Zombie-Love provides a fairly sedate cloud with keywords ranging from 1950s to zoo, while zombies-with-guns offered a huge cloud ranging from amnesia to zombie violence and I really should not be laughing this hard. You know how if you keep saying a word long enough it starts to have no meaning? It works if you're typing also. Zombie. Zombie zombie zombie zombie.

The IMDB is owned by Amazon, right? I would love to see this tied in with Amazon's tag efforts -- it would make browsing Amazon's DVD store a lot of fun...

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