This excellent new service is an example of Yahoo!'s built-in competitive advantage over Google. Drawing on its vast registered user base and broad content suite, Yahoo! has—perhaps with relative ease—rolled out a dynamic, fun, and useful movie recommendation engine. The interface is simple and hassle-free, getting the user started with good suggestions after minimal clicks. Thanks to your Yahoo! ID the service already knows your basic demographic, and after simply grading a few movies the system starts kicking back recommendations of movies located on DVD, in theaters, and on TV. The cross-linking is neatly arranged and handily references reviews, critical scores, local TV listings, local theater show times, and IM paths to like-minded users. This is what Yahoo! is all about: easy building of community around shared interests and tastes. Google has a movie-information index (use the "movie:" operator with any film-oriented keywords), but cannot come close to this level of rounded information or community-mindedness.

Even as Yahoo! presents movie recommendations (and they're not bad, right from the start), there always exists the opportunity to easily grade every film appearing on the page, refining the service's intelligence about you. when rating movies, it's important to game the system a bit. For example, I though "A Mighty Wind" was the least effective of Chritopher Guest's four satiric films, asnd it disappointed me. However, I do want to know about similar movies—I just want them to be better. In a case like that I give the movie a fairly high grade so that Yahoo! will continue showing me smart satires.

Through it all, the link to TV show times is perhaps the most useful part of it; it clues you in to broadcasts that you might never have a clue about.