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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

It autocompletes so you find out more quickly that Netflix doesn't carry it, and what similar options are

I get that you are annoyed Netflix didn't have the movie you wanted, but autocomplete doesn't make that worse.

I don't look for similar movies, I look for the exact movie I want, it's just a redirection of their poor catalog. If that was the intended use case, they'd have proper catalogs to drill down instead of a very long, arbitrary vertical canvas of always changing, non consistent categories.

Sounds like a personal preference.

When I search for "How to Train Your Dragon 2", I find Netflix doesn't have it.

But it has the original, plus a few series, so I turn on one of those instead.

You’re right, but it’s annoying for sure. Instead of telling me they don’t have a title, they complete its full name (as if to say „I know what you want, but I’m not gonna give it to ya“), yet show me some arbitrary stuff named similar.

It’s just a poor solution.

Usually, the search results are movies with similar genre to the one I was looking for, not just simply similar spelling etc. I assume they look up stuff like what other movies people who had seen the searched-for movie have seen. So if I was looking for Movie A and Netflix knows that people who've seen Movie A tend to like Movie B, C, D, etc (and these are available in your part of the world) it'll show these movies instead. I think this is nicer and better than just failing with zero results.

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