Show HN: Qwink.com - Search engine for online movies

5 points by jdq 14 years ago | 6 comments

I put this together to simplify finding where to watch an online movie. I'm not picky about which provider I use, but I do have an order of where I check for availability first.

I subscribe to Netflix and Amazon Prime, so my process usually goes: check Netflix, check Amazon Prime, compare prices between iTunes, Amazon, and Vudu rentals. It's an inefficient process, so I aggregated everything to one search.

This is a "for fun" project to get familiar with Solr. I am about to push a "Newly Released" page, and if anyone has any other suggestions or comments, I'd be very appreciative.

For those interested, it's running Tornado, MongoDB, and Solr on Rackspace and AWS. Crawling/API queries performed with Scrapy. It's not optimized for a phone browser yet, but it does look nice on a tablet.

http://www.qwink.com

geuis 14 years ago |

Its a good start. I'd also point out that I know of several companies in this space that have eventually been acquired, including tvtome.com and clicker.com. In this case, they were both acquired by CBS Interactive. If your project takes off, make sure that doesn't happen to you. Its basically like getting bought by Yahoo.

salman89 14 years ago |

Are you a price comparator or just a search engine? I would find that if you compared the available options against each other (ex is it cheaper for me to buy from iTunes or Amazon?) it may be more useful.

jdq 14 years ago | |

Prices are listed as well. How would one describe a price comparator/search engine for something like a tag line?

danest 14 years ago |

http://www.qwink.com

jeggers5 14 years ago |

What does it do and why do I need it? <- needs to be clearly and concisely answered on the home page.

jdq 14 years ago | |

Good advice, thanks.