searching for wooden watermelons

January 31, 2010 5:04 PM

I often find myself wanting to search sites like netflix and amazon with greater granularity than the sites currently offer. For example, I'd like to find every highly-rated thriller that takes place in another country and is available used for $5.00. Or if I'm searching netflix, I would want to find every foreign mystery that is rated at four stars or higher and is rated pg-13 or lower. Are there third-party clients or scripts that will accomplish these or similar tasks?
posted by mecran01 to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

IMDB's keyword search is pretty much as good as it gets for searches like this, since that's pretty much the only site with an adequately comprehensive database. (It's right there in the name!) Unfortunately, you're not going to find "available used for $5" a useful criterion there.
posted by Sys Rq at 5:29 PM on January 31, 2010

For Amazon: I saw this on the Metafilter projects page a couple of days ago and your question reminded me of 20 or better posted by DreamerFi.

It doesn't, as it stands, search anywhere near as deeply as you want but maybe you could post a similar question in the thread on projects and see what DreamerFi has to say? (you can see the thread here, DreamerFi asks for suggestions on new features etc.)
posted by selton at 5:35 PM on January 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Best way to approximate what you want is to use IMDB's power search and then use Movie Dude to easily move from whatever results you get to their respective Netflix pages.
posted by MikeHarris at 9:57 PM on January 31, 2010 [1 favorite]

Best answer: For netflix, I use instantwatcher.com all of the time. It's a terrific site that mines the netflix database to give you a lot of the hyperlinking that you're used to at IMDB, including ratings, years, genres, etc. Give it a shot!
posted by Read at 6:34 AM on February 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you for these responses. I think my question regarding Amazon is a poor one, fundamentally, because reader reviews aren't that great of an indicator of quality. I was primarily looking for ways to scrape up really fantastic books for under a buck and satisfy my book/purchase lust quickly.

Instantwatcher is amazing. I think I knew about it and forgot it, but if I use it just to find good stuff for my kids it will be a wonderful resource.
posted by mecran01 at 2:17 PM on February 1, 2010