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Rate my startup - Subzin: A movie quote search engine based on subtitles

25 points by lusob ↗ HN
Subzin.com is a movie quote search engine based on movie subtitles. Find any quote in millions of movie lines. All quotes are time-based contextualized, and linked with the imdb movie database

24 comments

[ 10.5 ms ] story [ 44.5 ms ] thread
sagacity
Yes, a cool idea, indeed. Congrats :-)

A quick suggestions:

Make the (logo and) tag line image (much) more readable.

vdm
+1 the logo screams amateur hour. Good concept though. I like how the subtitles have timecode.
bound008
Wow. This is the best example I have ever seen of function over form. I think the data returned is properly structured and the amazon/netflix affiliate capabilities mixed withed the seo capabilities of archiving the most most common searched (make sure to cover this in your privacy policy) are enough of a reason for you to get some design and possibly a new name for the site. Name first, then 99designs... good luck.
ohadpr
pretty cool! I recommend a more readable logo+title and perhaps a more memorable domain name.
lien
ok..let me ask you this? why can't i use google search vs. yours. I mean no one will think about suzbin when it comes to "search". the average user would probably go to google...
lien
that is not to say that you can't make it work, but it's hard...just put your shoes in the consumer...they probably go to google if they need to search for quotes...same way if you were looking for lyrics you'd go to google..and most of the time it works pretty well.
notahacker
It looks like an enthusiast or power user tool more than anything else, where the timing of the quote might be extremely useful. If I was a film student I'd bookmark it.

Looks like you're already showing up above the IMDB in Google for "movie quote search"

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hammock
That's where SEO comes in. Take for example the lyrics engines - they don't rely on their own search boxes, they rely on high rankings in Google searches. Subzim can do the same thing.
lien
this quote didn't even show up on your database, "That rug really tied the room together, did it not?" whereas it's fine on google
WesleyJohnson
It works fine for "That rug really tied the room together" and if you then click the magnifying glass to read it in context, it looks like the subtitles put "did it not?" a couple of seconds later. Maybe that's why it's not coming up with the result.
pmjoyce
Great start and a fun tool! I'd agree with others who suggest the name and design could use some work but they're totally fixable.

I noticed that all the Pulp Fiction quotes replace 'i' with '¡' http://www.subzin.com/quotes/Pulp%20Fiction

CrazedGeek
Couple issues:

1. Some quotes don't match up with their movie/TV show- as an example, the movie at the bottom of this page ( http://www.subzin.com/s/torchwood ) isn't at all related to the show the quotes are from ("Sleeper" from Torchwood).

2. Why do the Netflix recommendations all have "!!!" after them? It's very exciting, but weird.

Goldstein
my thoughts on this -first of all it must be renamed -you need a readable logo -you need a good site architecture -you need a shiny webdesign

After all those maybe it will success

nullsub
what would make this even more amazing would be the ability to automatically clip the quote you want from the movie. automatically time-aligning the text to audio is trivial, although i imagine this may have copyright implications.
nickconfer
One thing I'd do is work on improving the search.

When I search "dude wheres my car" I get no results. However searching "dude where's my car" gets results. Also I'd work on ranking. For that search Harold and Kumar come up first even though the search I made is also a movie title and referenced more times in the other movie.

Good idea. Spruce up the design and that will help as well. Good start though.

Nick

nickconfer
Maybe sort by relevance first. With movie quotes, I think you'll find a lot of niche groups that quote less popular movies than the ones with the largest box office.
nickconfer
One more example. searching "Stella" should bring up A Streetcar Named Desire in the first page but shows up in the third due to popularity.
wushupork
What about adding autocomplete or autosuggest as you type? I like it but agree w/ some posters about design needing some work.

Also, showing popular quotes, popular movies, allowing people to vote/favorite the quotes would be awesome.

Allowing people to tag quotes would be cool - delicious style. Eventually you will have a corpus of tags - say I need a movie quote for blah blah blah.

Suggesting quotes to people based on quotes they like. People who've searched for this also searched for this. etc.

It's definitely got potential.