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If it gets easier to find what you want on Netflix in the near future, you can thank a team of experts who came up with an improved search algorithm. Unless someone else can do better, Netflix is about to thank them too--to the tune of a million bucks.

The Netflix prize was first offered three years ago and has received entries from 50,000 contestants. This year's prospective winning group, actually a coalition of four teams known as BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, included statisticians, machine learning experts, and computer engineers from the U.S., Austria, Canada, and Israel, many of whom helped win the 2007 and 2008 prizes as well. Their work will improve Netflix search accuracy by 10.05 percent. Other entrants have 30 days to prove they can do better.

See The New York Times and Netflix Prize site.