Techniques are described for generating search results and content recommendations using a distance metric on a space of media titles. In one embodiment, each media title may be associated with metadata tags and represented by a vector which indicates those associated tags. The distance metric may measure distance as an angle between vectors representing media titles in a bent vector space that accounts for correlations between tags. Further, a non-linear scaling may be applied to the vectors representing media titles to correct for under-tagging and redundant tagging. Based on the distance metric, a search or recommendation application may generate search results and/or content recommendations and cause the same to be presented to a user.