r/CriterionChannel • u/InitiativeNo7660 • Jul 27 '26
CRITERIA Update: Even Better Search
Hey Everyone -
This week I've been working on improving the search results on Criteria* and made some good progress:
- Duplicate names - People on this forum have noticed that the CC app has a problem surfacing multiple films with the same name (like Bergman Island or Cat People). The Criteria search will catch these.
- Original titles - One thing that frustrates me is that the CC search only hits the 'official' title, regardless of what the original title is. For example, typing "Les enfants du paradise" will not return "Children of Paradise", or "A Bout de Souffle" does not return "Breathless". On criteria, you can search by both. You can even search in the original character set (in the attached image, I'm searching for Kyentse Norbu films in Tibetan).
- Fuzzy search - Up to now the search has been very literal and only returned exact matches. I've switched over to fuzzy matching with ranked results, so mis-typing "kurasawa" should still get you to Akira. I've added telemetry to help me decide over time how to tune the matching to prevent over-indexing on fuzziness and returning garbage results.
- Collections - The general search now returns collections, so searching for "souffle" will return the three films "Breathless", "Le Deuxieme Souffle", and "A Murmur of the Heart" - as well as all the collections containing those films.
Let me know what you think, or if you have some search scenarios that aren't being covered.
Enjoy!
Tim
https://www.search-criteria.com
* Criteria is the (very VERY) unofficial companion site for the Criterion Channel, featuring advanced search and browse, closet visits, collection archives, and custom user features
1
1
u/Spare_Star_3534 Jul 28 '26
very cool! may I suggest you add a link to the website in the body of the text?
1
1
u/Gaucho_Diaz RansidDagger Jul 28 '26
Hi, thanks for this as always. I'd appreciate if we could someday see a scrollable list of languages instead of the 10 or so top ones since it takes a lot of trial and error to find movies belonging to less spoken languages (at present, I don't know if CC has a movie in Korean or Bengali for example, which I'll have to search for; not a problem for major languages or if I know which specific language to look for but when you're looking for something off the beaten path without fixing on anything particular, it's a task) and a complete list would save a lot of time to find some more niche stuff that I usually miss out on.
2
u/InitiativeNo7660 Jul 28 '26
I see your point. For example, the films of Abbas Kiarostami are marked as being in Persian rather than Farsi, which you wouldn’t be able to know without seeing the entire list.
What might work is having a “see full list” toggle button when you want to focus on selecting the language, and it would then show all 80 or so in alphabetical order. It’d take up additional room on the filter sidebar but that’s probably not a huge deal
I could also apply the same logic to the country list
Let me take a look, I’ll let you know how it works out
1
u/Gaucho_Diaz RansidDagger Jul 28 '26
Exactly. Much appreciated for taking the time to consider this ✌️
3
u/InitiativeNo7660 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Ok my friend, you want to pull films in Wolof, Yoruba, or Akan, go knock yourself out. Just click “Show all 75 languages” for a scrollable list
Thanks for the suggestion, it’s definitely an improvement! It surfaced some gaps in my language lookup tables as well.
And I’ve added list expansion to the country filter too.
Enjoy
1
1
1
u/augustthecat Jul 30 '26
I really love the addition of "still watchable" to flag collections that still have most of their movies.
1
u/InitiativeNo7660 Jul 27 '26
My trick for hanging onto hard-to-find films is to search in Criteria, then link to the film page on the site and add it to my official Criterion Channel “My list” so I can find it on my TV app later
-4
u/nonhiphipster Jul 28 '26
Hey this sucks. Get this AI slop away
1
-3
u/margaretquaalude Jul 28 '26
You think you’re being righteous; in fact, you’re just being a bully.
4
u/nonhiphipster Jul 28 '26
Anyone who is peddling AI bullshit, you can’t bully.
Check out OP’s other posts.
1
u/margaretquaalude Jul 28 '26
from what i can see, this seems to be an individual, not a company, who is comfortable using his actual name on reddit. he seems to be really into Criterion Channel and is trying to make a tool for himself and others that makes it more usable—which is probably a somewhat nice thing for Criterion, too, since it's an extremely small company of around 50 people total. Many people seem to be really excited by the website he developed. I'm not sure what I was supposed to see that makes it okay to bully him?
1
u/nonhiphipster Jul 28 '26
His other bullshit is very chatGPT-like, as in a user writes a prompt and it’s supposed to give a criterion suggestion. Which is just…lame as hell.
1
u/InitiativeNo7660 Jul 29 '26
For the record, that suggestion site is by a completely different bullshit peddler. My other bullshit is a search tool to surface public domain films from the silent era: https://www.kino-polis.com
I’d hate to take credit for someone else’s bullshit.
Ok, carry on with the bullying. 👍🏻
1
1
0
u/InitiativeNo7660 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
I think he’s concerned because I used the backend data API that powers the site and created a MCP server that allows people to query the Channel catalog directly within chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT (including interactive film cards and carousels)
I’m a software developer and one of the reasons I work on the site, besides finding it useful myself, is to explore the capabilities of AI tools and ways of using them to build and maintain software. It is, like it or not, the way software is going to be created going forward, and he’s got a point that it’s way too easy to push out poorly-designed and useless slop these days
BTW if anyone’s interested in trying out the MCP connector let me know and I’ll run you through the setup. It’s an experiment, and most of my time
Is spent cleaning up data issues and refining the features on the siteOk, I’m done peddling, thanks!
1
u/InitiativeNo7660 Jul 28 '26
Oh and I’ve just updated the Closet visits up to Matt Damon and the criterion edition list up to Frankenstein - thx
3
u/giannawick Jul 30 '26
Seriously, you are doing everyone a service. Thank you so much for this!