When I search on a specific title, I get anything that roughly matches any keywords in combination, then also any title that remotely associates (even conceptually):in any possible way with any individual keyword.
But what it won't tell me is "we don't have the title you want".
Specific example from earlier: look for the 2007 film "Sunshine". Then, go plug "sunshine film" into duckduckgo and see what comes up as the very first item.
>But what it won't tell me is "we don't have the title you want".
That's by design, not accident. The Netflix catalog is much, much smaller than most people think, especially for films. They have just under 6,000 titles available in the US, but a large proportion of that is cheap filler that most viewers will have no interest in. Searching the catalog using a third-party tool reveals just how thin it really is.
Netflix have focussed on recommendations over search because it makes their service look better. If you search for something, the odds are that Netflix don't have it. Recommendation allows them to promote their original content, which is Netflix's main moat - if you're hooked on Stranger Things or Orange Is The New Black, you're far less likely to cancel your subscription.
Do you really think that’s not on purpose or surprising? If you show them recommendations instead of an empty search result they might want to watch something else or get inspired to use other search terms to find some other result.
That may sound like a bad search for engineers but for the user it’s probably what they want and what Netflix measured.
Being an engineer is no excuse for not understanding basic product design nor being unwilling to see/accept how a feature benefits users.
(I'm saying that to agree with you, not to correct you)
This example is particularly good because they didn't even say "I get it, but I don't like it" or "I think it'd be better if..." Rather, they went straight to "wait, netflix devs are supposed to have skillz?" and "this must be incompetence", an assumption that represents one of the more toxic parts of our community.
I think the way they do it is very elegant. They surmise the film you want and if they don't have it, they put it in the top bar as "find films related to X". That way, they can push you into consuming something else even if they don't have what you were originally looking for.
Probably causes some customers to watch into some of the crappy search result titles, to see if it's the thing they wanted. Hence, the "hours watched" metric goes up.
Probably not so much toward retention (I'd have quit over this were I not getting it free) as toward redirecting you to content they already control at little or no variable cost.
When I search on a specific title, I get anything that roughly matches any keywords in combination, then also any title that remotely associates (even conceptually):in any possible way with any individual keyword.
But what it won't tell me is "we don't have the title you want".
Specific example from earlier: look for the 2007 film "Sunshine". Then, go plug "sunshine film" into duckduckgo and see what comes up as the very first item.