Staying up with a newborn can be challenging. If you are lucky, the newborn may sleep as you rock back and forth with an arm free. This is the situation that I found myself in a few days ago. And since I had a hand free, I decided to watch a movie on my iPhone... or atleast a portion of it. Since time was at a premium, every keystroke counted. Netflix's search interface helped out.I ended up watching "Rudy" - a movie that I had vaguely heard about before. As I searched for the movie on Netflix iPhone app, I was happy to see that the top result for the search "Rudy" was for the movie I wanted to see and it was available in Netflix's streaming library. Netflix listed another 12 items as "completion suggestions" while I was still on the search bar. Of these 12 items, the bottom 11 were also visually different from the first 2 suggestions - a hint that I could not play them instantly. When I hit "search", the same 13 results were listed with a little more information and the DVD cover for each result.
While usable, the Netflix iPhone app misses a couple of items from its search interface. First, there is no way to search for an actor or any other personality or keyword associated with a movie (or other programming). Thus, searching for "John Cusack" returns no results. Somewhat inconvenient if all that one remembers of a movie is the lead actor/actress. Further, there is no way to order a disc from the iPhone app. If I wanted to order one of the 11 results for "Rudy" that were not available for streaming, I would have to leave the Netflix App and go to Netflix's web-site - not easy when your mobility is limited. Finally, I noticed that the same search on netflix.com yields ~400 results. Many of these results are for terms similar to "Rudy". Netflix clearly clearly has more "results" for my search but it appears that it doesn't yet have a good way to display the results on a mobile device. What if I wanted a title outside the top-13 that the Netflix App showed me, but in the 400 results I could get on netflix.com?
Overall, while search on the Netflix iPhone App worked pretty well, it did leave me thinking that it could do more while maintaining most of its existing ease of use.
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