The new search engine Frinkiac is a catalogue of all Simpsons moments contained within the first fifteen seasons.
Die-hard fans are now able to find any quote and meme it whenever they want to say something that’s perfectly expressed by a character of the globally acclaimed animated series.
Named after Professor Frink, the site consists of three million searchable screengrabs from the most quotable show of the past twenty years and matches them with the quotes people type on the search bar. They have to know the exact quote or at least a standout portion of it in order to find the exact moment they happened.
Frinkiac was created by Sean Schulte, Paul Kehrer and Allie Young, who started to build it about six months ago. “We had the idea several years ago when we were quoting The Simpsons at each other all day long, and it was surprisingly difficult to find an image of the scenes we were quoting on Google,” Schulte told WIRED.
Most of the code was written within a week to parse de video files and upload them to the site so they could be indexed and searched. Young then spent a couple of weeks developing and tweaking the UI.
As explained by Kehrer in a post, Frinkiac cuts every scene from the fifteen seasons into 100 pieces, takes the average color of each piece and then compares its tone to the most recently saved picture. A new screenshot is generated if the server detects the coloration is different enough.
The site parses subtitle files to match the resulting screenshots with the exact quote and lines up time codes between images and words. Kehrer said Frinkiac was completely built several months ago but they had just been using it with friends and coworkers. It was yesterday when the site landed publicly on the Internet.
For each of the searches Frinkiac returns a range of shots from that moment to allow users to choose their favorite one. There’s no way to directly share from the site, but people can always screenshot the screenshot. Shulte said sharing features like Twitter cards and Facebook Open Graph support will be soon available on the server.
One thing the Frinkiac creators have noticed is that the search queries show that many people often try to find a description for a specific scene, which is not what the search engine was built for. Fans can’t find every appearance of Fat Tony on a whim, just moments when some else is talking about him. Duffman, for instance, is the easiest character to find because he’s always talking about himself in third-person.
Can’t wait to try Frinkiac out? Go ahead: Frinkiac site
Source: Wired