Excellent! When I heard about this feature several weeks ago, I knew right away that it'd be really useful.
If you want to find movie showtimes in San Jose, just head over to yahoo.com or search.yahoo.com and plug in showtimes san jose. The first results you should see are links for movie theaters as well as times for popular movies.
If I still lived in Ohio, I'd have used showtimes toledo. Sadly, showtimes findlay and showtimes bowling green don't work. They do return relevant content, but it's not the shortcut links. I'll bug the Search and/or Movies folks about that.
I suspect it's just a matter of time before the other search sites copy this.
Post a note here if you find other cities that don't seem to work but ought to. I'm curious to see what the coverage is like outside of the few I played with this morning.
Oh, in case you missed it, there's also a "gas prices" shortcut you can use to find cheap gas. Example: gas prices san jose. Right now it'll direct you to GasBuddy or GasPriceWatch. Hopefully someday we'll use zip code or address data for registered users and show 'em prices right in their local neighborhood...
Update: Cool. As noted in the comments below, you can use a zip code if the city name doesn't work.
Posted by jzawodn at June 18, 2004 08:51 AM
You can use a zip code, e.g. showtimes 45840. Since there are multiple Springfields, a zip makes more sense when you know it.
showtimes bend doesn't work as it should, but showtimes bend oregon and showtimes 97701 do. Pretty interesting stuff.
Google does this as well: try searching for "yahoo showtimes [your zip code or city]". Omitting the yahoo doesn't always bring up the yahoo link at #1, but it should be on page 1.
A neat feature, but it will should be updated to use the most common theatres for it's results. For instance if you put in showtimes Rockford you get back results for the second run theatre. This is weird because Showplace 16 (the biggest theatre we have around) and Colonial Village theatres are both in Rockford and are both first run theatres. However, it appears you can do showtimes 61108 and get back the results for Showplace 16.
The nice thing about the feature is that it at least gives you a link for "local theatres" where you can find other theatres in your area. This last feature appears to cover quite a bit of ground as, in my example above, it seems to go as far north as Janesville, WI and as far south as Rochelle, IL. Looks to be about a 50 mile radius.
Hmmm...Could the city search be defaulting to the most common zip code for the city when doing the search? 61103 is the most common zip code for Rockford. Both City Hall and the North Towne theatres are in that zip code whereas Showplace 16 is in 61108 and Colonial Village is in 61107. A Yahoo map puts the star for Rockford on the side of the river that uses a 61103 zip code. I would be willing to bet that when it looks for show times it does the query based on zip codes so it can find the "nearest" results and any results for the local theatres within range of that zip code.
This works amazingly well. Even the one-horse town in which I live has listings shown.
Jeremy- thanks for the tip.
Yahoo Germany has a similar feature. Since the content usually costs money I think it's an advantage to be a portal. Unless of course you find a way to extract movie time information from all the cinema homepages.
http://de.search.yahoo.com/search/de?p=kino+hamburg
What a great feature I didn't hear about that until now I will try implementing it or referring to it from my sites!
Woo, thanks kaishaku. I was actually looking for the second-run theater in Rockford. I used to use Hollywood.com to get my movie listings, but I might try this for a while.
Hey Jeremy -- How about a GeoRSS feed with movie showtimes? Can I get that anywhere on Yahoo!?
I always open the Theater website to see the movie showtimes in Emagine Theaters, Novi. But have never tried with yahoo or google. I will surely try. Well, we can use the zip codes to find the movie showtime in a town but if i want to look for the nearest car rental shop from my home?
