Ever looked at the movies Netflix recommends for you and scratched your head?

The digital content provider has heard the customer criticisms and is working ways to improve the content recommended to users. According to the Associated Press, Netflix executives John Ciancutti and Todd Yellin are working on a system that will offer better recommendations and treat users more as “an old friend.”

Ciancutti and Yellin have a team of 150 engineers tackling the issue. The company has been working on and tweaking the system for 13 years now and boasts that it is good enough now to find a romantic comedy that subscribers who typically view action movies will like.

Netflix says that three-quarters of their 26 million customers use the recommendation system to select new DVDs or streaming options. As subscribers shift from getting DVDs through the mail to the instant gratification of Internet viewing, Netflix needs to make those suggestions even better.

The goal now is to learn individual viewing preferences so well that every recommendation is a hit with that subscriber, says Ciancutti, Netflix’s vice president of product engineering.

If Ciancutti can get the system right, Netflix can direct people to movies and TV shows it already has. That will keep customers happy and help limit how much Netflix has to spend to obtain rights to additional online video.

If he gets it wrong, customers will be more inclined to search for something and become frustrated when they can’t find it. That’s a real concern because Netflix’s online library doesn’t offer as comprehensive a video selection as the DVD service the company wants to phase out.

“We are using all of our best ideas right now, but I know a year from now, I am going to be looking back and saying, ‘Oh wow, we didn’t have this feature or that feature,’ and I will be really embarrassed,” Ciancutti says.

Ciancutti invented Netflix’s original recommendation system, which was mostly based on the ratings of customers willing to share their opinions about DVDs.

When he first started out, Ciancutti just wanted to come up with a system that didn’t recommend DVDs in short supply or movies that a subscriber had already watched. The recommendations have become progressively more sophisticated as more people signed up for Netflix and engineers got more data to crunch and feed into its computer formulas.

But the company’s engineers always realized they weren’t getting a complete picture. Those discs may have sat around for weeks or might not have ever been watched in their entirety. And many customers have never bothered to rate movies.

Ciancutti believes the recommendations should get better now that more people are turning to online viewing. Since Netflix introduced its streaming option five years ago, billions of hours of video have been watched to give the company’s engineers more insight into how and when customers use the service.

With streaming, Netflix no longer needs customers to give feedback. Its computers log whether someone mostly watches comedies on weekends and dramas after work, and whether the entire movie gets watched. It knows which customers tend to devour multiple episodes of TV comedies in a single viewing session. It can tell whether someone tends to rewind movies when certain actors appear.

“The signals we are getting about what people are watching, when they are watching and how much they are watching are much richer than ever before,” says Neil Hunt, Netflix’s chief product officer.