If you can't remember the name of a film it can be a real nuisance, and it can nag at you for ages. Well, worry not. There's a new search engine called What is my movie and you can simply type in some basic concepts and it will try and find matches for you. I tried several and it found them every time. For example I tried 'gunslinger looking for gold in the American Civil War' and it came back with The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, 'man looking for family in the Civil War' gave me Shenandoah, 'two men on holiday in the lake district' resulted in Withnail and I. You can also try it with film quotes 'all the towns in all the world' came back with Casablanca (the best film ever made).
They say of themselves "Whatismymovie.com is a showcase of the technology of Valossa, which is a spin-off company of the University of Oulu, Finland. We aspire to create a new, descriptive way of searching video content. Our technology understands the contents of video files itself. Ranging from text to pattern recognition, we reach down into data that has not been searchable in the past."
You can help improve the engine by clicking on the buttons for a good or bad match. You can also run searches on Titles, Actors, Directors and Traditional Search. It's not clear to me what that last is, but you can use it! The display of results is really nice - you get a picture of the movie - usually a film poster, a nice abbreviated synopsis, a link to 'more like this' and you can also click on a link to watch the film, which runs an Amazon.com search and returns a price as well.
It's a really nice engine, and one of those 'Oh, I'll just ask it one more thing' resources that keep you there for hours. Many thanks to Val Skelton for finding this one.
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