Here is the latest entry in the movie search engine arena – and it’s a damn good one: Nanocrowd. Its newest version launches today, but I was able to get a sneak preview of the site as a result of some conversations I’ve been having with the company’s CEO Rod March. Let me pull some excerpts from Rod’s emails to introduce Nanocrowd’s unique approach:

We’re launching the Nanocrowd movie search engine based on technology we developed called Reaction Mapping – an innovative technology that captures insights and reactions contained in the millions of movie viewers’ comments on the Web, exposing the reasons why viewers liked a movie. Understanding why movie viewers liked a movie is critical to providing accurate recommendations. Reaction Mapping uses mathematical modeling to analyze and summarize the complex emotions found in movie viewers’ comments and makes sense of the varied reactions individuals have to a particular movie.

Users can search for movies based on their favorite movies, actors, or directors – without the need to rate and rank movies, search through reviews, or enter personal profile information. And, they can fine-tune and further personalize the movie recommendations to match their unique interests or mood by selecting a Nanogenre like “pleasant, feel-good, delight” or “intriguing, gripping, moving.” Users can add movies directly to their Netflix queue with one click or use Watch Now! to watch movies instantly from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Crackle, or YouTube.

I checked it out by entering the movie Parenthood. Clicked go. Immediately brought up another page. On the left, there was a list “Movies Most Like” that included Marvin’s Room, Little Miss Sunshine, and My Life and a list “Movies Least Like” including Dark City, Assault on Precinct 13, and From Russia With Love. Then up top, they had other tabs you could click:

Families, Father, Humorous: The Royal Tennenbaums, Home for the Holidays, Eulogy

Tear-jerker, Father, Relationships: Life as a House, The Barbarian Invasion, Big Fish

Heartwarming, Sad, Drama: Stepmom, The Family Stone, Hope Floats

Son, Comedy-drama, Neurotic: World According to Garp, As Good As It Gets, Terms of Endearment

Likable, Delight, Jerk: Dinner Rush, Nobody’s Fool, Christmas in the Clouds

Heartbreaking, Sympathy, Complicated: The Unknown, The Kid, When a Man Loves a Woman

So you might logically ask, like I did, where did those three word composite descriptors come from. Here is Rod’s response:

To answer your question, no one at Nanocrowd has written or selected any of the words you see in the nanogenre. These are all words we gathered in our analysis of user comments online (actually millions of comments from sites like IMDb, Yahoo, Amazon). We put their words through a series of linguistic, semantic, and statistical models that figure out the clusters of meaning as well as the movies that relate to each cluster. This is what we call “Reaction Mapping” – mapping the reactions of movie viewers and figuring out the Reaction Map for each movie.

I can tell you lots more about our analysis if you want, but rest assured that everything you see on our site (including not only the nanogenres, but also the most-like lists, crowd ratings, and movies in a nutshell) comes from an analysis of the words that movie viewers’ use to describe movies. We think that understanding why people liked movies is vitally important, so we focus on what they say about movies instead of how they rate them.

Here’s the thing: Nanocrowd is not only helpful in trying to figure out what movie to put on your Netflix list; it can also help you as a screenwriter. This is what I wrote to Rod:

Your site, I think, could be an enormously helpful tool for screenwriters to fuel their brainstorming process. Here is an analog analogy: Back when I first broke in as a screenwriter (1987), one of the first books I bought when I moved to LA was Halliwell’s Film Guide. At the time, it had information on perhaps 15,000 movies, but what was key for me was for most of them, Halliwell included a one-line description of the plot. So I could literally go through page-by-page — which I did — using a highlighter to mark ones I thought could make for an interesting starting point for brainstorming. Collect a bunch of those, then gender-bend them, genre-bend them, mix and max, just play around with the core ideas.

Your site should feed into this type of approach particularly with your NanoGenre component to help spur brainstorming possibilities in the minds of writers.

So yet another way to enhance your brainstorming.

For more information about how Nanocrowd, you can go here.