Make 3 million Simpsons memes with the Frinkiac search engine

The world wasn’t crying out for a search engine of the first 15 seasons of the Simpsons with an editor that allows you to quickly hack each one up into memes, but now we know it exists…

Hello Frinkiac! Named after the resident Simpsons geek Professor Frink (obvs), this slightly bizarre contraption was created by a three-person dev team, Paul Kehrer, Sean Schulte and Allie Young, to help everyone celebrate god’s gift that is the Simpsons.

Simply enter a search term, or an exact quote, and scroll through almost three million scenes from 335 episodes to find a line from the show perfect for any occasion. Then click ‘create meme’ and edit the text if you’re not happy with it. Done.

You can also click ‘full episode’ to scroll back through all the scenes if the selection isn’t quite right.

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To build this wondrous machine, the team chopped up each episode using video parsing software, which cut each scene into 100 pieces, checked the average color of each piece and, if different enough from the previous one, saved it as a new image.

They then grabbed the subtitles for each episode and matched the timecodes up with the frames.

And, a tiny bit like Google, Frinkiac even offers predictive search results using the first two letters of each word that appears in the subtitle index.

There’s more on the tech stuff in a blog post here.

➤ Frinkiac – The Simpsons Screenshot Search Engine [Paul Kehrer via Wired]