I've got an idea. The googlewhacking phenomenon and this post from Mitsu have cross-pollenated in my brain. The background is that people have very different tastes, and most of the time, you can't just blindly trust people's reviews or recommendations. People have very different ideas about things.... about what makes something "good" or "bad". The other driving point is that there often seems to be SO MUCH stuff out there. So many movies, so many albums... and you just know that there is a ton of GREAT stuff out there that you are missing.

So, the idea is this: people create "recommended" pages, where they just keep lists of all the things that they like. Movies, music, restaurants, artists... anything. These pages will also contain a common identifier, or code, that will designate this page as being a "recommended" page. Preferably, this would be a word or phrase that is not common, so it wouldn't appear in google search results otherwise. Lets call them... submonitions. As you can see, you don't get any results in google for it (as of 1/28/2002).

So, people create "submonitions" pages, with lists of all of their favorite things. Then, if you want to find someone who has similar tastes as yourself, simply type into google the word "submonitions" followed by a list of YOUR submonitions (you could just cut and paste from your page). The first result will probably be your own page, but the next results will be the submonitions pages that have the most matches to your list. Hopefully, then, this person's page will have some other stuff listed that you will also like.

As Mitsu pointed out, in your search you will probably want to use things that are not too common.. or, things that you like a lot, but most people do not.

Just to get things rolling, here's a start to my submonitions page. Spread the word, create your own. It's easy! :)

UPDATE (1/30): Mitsu points out a small problem with the submonitions idea. By default Google requires that all the keywords you are searching for appear on a page in order to return it as a result. However, I believe it will still work if you format your search like this: "submonitions [item1] OR [item2] OR [item3] OR [item4] OR ..."