One of the stupid design flaws of The Internet Movie Database (or IMDb) is that the movie URLs only include database IDs, which leads to addresses that look like “http://imdb.com/title/tt0390384/” for a film like Primer. As a general rule for something like this the text of the link should be the name of the movie you’re linking too, but that’s not always convenient, leading to links like this, which are vague and not human-readable. Personally, I hate not knowing what the IMDb page is being linked to before I click it, but there’s no way I’m going to memorize every stupid ID to figure out what film is tt0114369.
As a result, I usual end up linking to Netflix, which includes the title of the movie in the address, like a modern website should do (Netflix example of Primer). However, Netflix doesn’t have the same amount of information that IMDb does, nor is it as much fun to play around with, so it’s less than ideal.
I figured out how to solve this problem in my last post. If you mouse over movie titles you’ll see that the titles of the films have been appended to the IMDb URLs. It’s real easy to do. All you have to do is add a “?” after the final slash, and then you can insert any text you want. For example, the ID I previously hadn’t memorized could have an address of imdb.com/title/tt0114369/?Se7en. Now it’s clear what the film is. Easy. If you want to get special you can even do this. The text after the question mark is ignored by IMDb’s addressing engine, so it’s up to you what you want to include (please use responsibly!).
(Note to anyone who’s on the inside at IMDb: This kind of thing would actually be very easy to add on IMDb’s end. If IMDb just adds the title of movies to their URLs in the manner described here they’d have pretty, human-readable links, with no foreseeable interruption to their service.)
For us, until IMDb permanently changes their link design, which I wouldn’t bet on at this point, I would suggest to web writers to implement this kind of hack when linking to IMDb. It’s generally poor form to use mysterious links, and unfortunately IMDb’s link are all mysterious. I would appreciate it, and I imagine others would as well. I’m actually really surprised I haven’t seen this done before, given how easy it is to do.
Oh, and if you haven’t seen it already, you should see this film. It’s truly a work of art.
Tags: Technology
You might find this helpful: http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?howtolink#old
We originally used text based URLs, but given that over 1,000 titles per week change their spelling/format/year-of-release, the scheme was unworkable even 10 years ago when we abandoned it. We still support the old syntax, however, be aware that you are linking at your own risk and are likely to leave your visitors with dead links. The old link format is http://www.imdb.com/Title? as in:
http://www.imdb.com/Title?Superbad+(2007)
You’ll need to place leading articles at the end of a title to match our internal format as in:
http://www.imdb.com/Title?Bourne+Ultimatum,+The+(2007)
Given that studies consistently show that the vast majority of users rarely even look at the URL of the page they are viewing, you can bet an even smaller number look at the URL where they are about to click
. All in all, it’s better to use to the numeric IDs.
Hope this helps,
Col Needham Founder & managing director, IMDb.com
Thanks for the reply.
I concur that numeric IDs are ideal for a database like yours, but you can have information in the address that is ignored on the server. Netflix works that way, where http://www.netflix.com/Movie/60034782 and http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Primer/60034782 both point to the same page. In fact, the title “Primer” can be changed to anything and it still goes to the correct page, because it’s looking at the numeric ID and not the title.
Granted, only handsome internet savvy folks like myself might appreciate it, but it would still be nice if something like that was implemented at IMDb.