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Expand your entertainment horizons with TasteKid
Strange name yet an effective site, TasteKid helps you discover new movies, music, TV shows, books, and games.
Finding a discovery engine that is actually useful is rare. In my experience, they either spit out vague, useless recommendations or they return results so predictable as to prevent discovery. Thus, it was with trepidation I approached TasteKid. Turns out that underneath its odd name, TasteKid boasts an engine that successfully occupies the fertile ground between pointless and predictable.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET)
Head to TasteKid.com and try it for yourself. Front and center, you'll find a search box and seven tabs, six of which let you narrow your search to music, movies, TV shows, books, authors, and games. You can also mix and match. For example, you can find books you might like by searching for a movie you particularly enjoyed or vice versa. You can also enter multiple search terms, separating each by a comma. TasteKid helpfully makes suggestions as you enter a search query, though its knowledge of the entertainment landscape is not exhaustive. It didn't know who Joshua Ferris was, for example, whose novel "The Unnamed" I will recommend to you on my own.
TasteKid returns between roughly a dozen to 17 recommendations per search, though I wish there was a way to get additional results beyond this initial batch. Clicking on one of the recommendations opens a pop-up window with a summary from Wikipedia along with Like, Dislike, Save, and Meh buttons. These buttons let TasteKid learn your tastes, but you must sign up for an account first. There are also links to read and write comments. Also, for movies, TV shows, and games, TasteKid ever so helpfully embeds a trailer to this pop-up window, while music results get an embedded music video. At the top of this pop-up window are Share and Get tabs. Share lets you broadcast your affinity for the item on Facebook and Twitter, while the Get tab will take you to an Amazon search results page.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET)
If you create an account, TasteKid will be able to deliver better recommendations, based on your likes and dislikes (and "mehs," though I fail to see how not having much of an opinion of something helps TasteKid get to know you). With an account, you can also see your recent searches via a button below the search box and make and reply to comments. Click on the green Profile button in the upper-right corner and you can all of the items you've liked, disliked, meh'd, and saved.
