Wired reports that the world’s most advanced search engine dedicated to nothing but finding Simpsons quotes has now launched. Called Frinkiac (guh-hay), it boasts a database of over three million screenshots from the first 15 years of the series, plus every quote anyone might be looking for to garnish those shots.
Frinkiac was created by entrepreneurs Sean Schulte, Paul Kehrer and Allie Young. “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. Six months later they decided to make it a project. “The majority of the code was written in about a week, to parse the video files and upload them to the server and index them and search them,” says Schulte.
Frinkiac actually generates screen captures on the fly by taking the quote you entered and finding that exact moment in the episode. How does it work? According to Wired, “Frinkiac cuts every scene into 100 parts, takes the average color of each part, and compares its coloration to the most recently saved image. If they’re different enough, voila!, new screenshot, with minimal redundancy through the hundreds of hours of video being parsed.” Not unlike donuts, is there anything it can’t do?
The value of Frinkiac should be well known to anyone who’s frequented any form of social media. At any time, someone can say something stupid that the iconic animated program has a perfect comeback for. But it may not replace Google Image for that task immediately. Frinkiac is still a work in progress and lacks several important features (the most important one being buttons that instantly share the screenshot).
Says Kehrer, “We have lots of ideas, but much of it is geared around trying to make the search “‘smarter.” For instance, we commonly see heterographs in searches (e.g. breaks vs. brakes). Google is smart enough to handle this sort of thing, but currently Frinkiac is not.”
It has a way to go before it’s worthy of the name Frink. Right now it’s hovering halfway between Lenny and Lisa.
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