Frinkiac is a website for users to search for words or phrases from episodes of the American

animated sitcom An animated sitcom is a subgenre of the sitcom that is animated instead of live action and is generally made or created for adult audiences in most cases. ''SpongeBob SquarePants'', ''The Simpsons'', ''South Park'', and ''Family Guy'' are four of ...

The Simpsons ''The Simpsons'' is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical depiction of American life, epitomized by the Simpson family, which consists of Homer Simpson, Homer, Marge ...

''. It returns screenshots related to the search terms, from which it generates memes and

animated GIFs The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...

. Created by Paul Kehrer, Sean Schulte and Allie Young, the site is named after a computer built by one of the show's recurring characters,

Professor Frink Professor John I.Q. Nerdelbaum Frink Jr., is a new recurring character in the animated television series ''The Simpsons''. He is voiced by Hank Azaria, and first appeared in the 1991 episode "Old Money". Frink is Springfield's nerdy scientist an ...

. The site was critically acclaimed upon its launch, and ''

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'' wrote: "It may be the greatest feat of Internet engineering we've ever seen". As of May 2016, screenshots from the first seventeen seasons of ''The Simpsons'' are in Frinkiac's database. On August 8, 2016 the developers debuted ''Morbotron'', a similar website for '' Futurama''. It was followed by ''Master of All Science'', a ''

Rick and Morty {{Infobox television , image = Rick and Morty title card (cropped).png , alt = , caption = , genre = {{Plainlist, * Animated sitcom * Adult animation * Science fiction * Black comedy * ...

'' site in the same mold, on July 30, 2017.

Development history

Paul Kehrer and Sean Schulte had the idea of a search engine for screenshots of ''

'' based on quotes from the show for several years. The two often communicated using lines from the series while at work and it was very hard for them to find screenshots related to the quotes on

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

. Development of Frinkiac began around August 2015. Most of Frinkiac's code, written with the Go language in a week, determines which screenshot frame is most pertinent to the search term by cutting each scene into 100 buckets of matching size amount. The standard color of each bucket is then used to compare it with a frame of the bucket in the previous frame and the image is saved if these two buckets are different enough. In addition to parsing episode video files with

ffmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of vid ...

and cgo, the code also analyzes subtitle files, matching the timecodes of the subtitles and the screenshots. After a few weeks with Allie Young creating the

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

, the three people involved in making Frinkiac tested it with their relatives but didn't launch it for public use until February 2, 2016, starting with almost three million screenshots from episodes of the show's first fifteen seasons. On May 15, 2016, Frinkiac was updated with the addition of 201,877 screenshots and 21,444 subtitles for episodes from the sixteenth and seventeenth seasons of ''The Simpsons''. The GIF loop time limit was also increased to seven seconds, because, as Kehrer joked: "it was derived from my desire to see Grandpa walk in circles at the burlesque house entrance". Kehrer also announced some features for the site that were in the works, such as mp4 and

WebM WebM is an audiovisual media file format. It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML5 video and the HTML5 audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponsored ...

s support for GIF files, conversion of subtitles into other languages, the ability to control the font and font size of the text in a meme image, and a showcase of Simpsons screenshots and memes. In a February 2016 interview, Kehrer said that he'd liked to include more complex search parameters to find well-known screenshots of scenes that don't have much dialogue.

Reception

Frinkiac garnered critical acclaim upon its launch. A ''

'' journalist who called Frinkiac a "brilliantly designed and mind-blowingly comprehensive search engine", wrote that it "may be the greatest feat of Internet engineering we've ever seen". An

Engadget ''Engadget'' ( ) is a multilingual technology blog network with daily coverage of gadgets and consumer electronics. ''Engadget'' manages ten blogs four of which are written in English and six have international versions with independent editor ...

writer said: "As someone who references ''The Simpsons'' dozens of times a day, Frinkiac ..is practically a godsend. Its search function is far faster than sifting through Google images, and the ability to find specific moments during scenes is particularly helpful." Marie Boran of ''

The Irish Times ''The Irish Times'' is an Irish daily broadsheet newspaper and online digital publication. It launched on 29 March 1859. The editor is Ruadhán Mac Cormaic. It is published every day except Sundays. ''The Irish Times'' is considered a newspaper ...

'' praised the site's use of the ''Simpsons'' font for the text of meme images. When reviewing the site upon its February 2016 launch, Hannah Hawkins writing for

Junkee Junkee is an Australian popular culture and news website run by new media company Junkee Media. It covers various topics including film, university, food, TV, politics, travel, career, health and Internet culture. Its target demographic is 18- to ...

, supported Frinkiac's inclusion of only episodes from the first fifteen seasons, saying "there's no chance of any awful unfunny jokes appearing on your screen". The May 2016 addition of the GIF feature was also significantly praised by journalists. As CNET's Claire Reilly wrote, "a million poets could try for a million years and still describe but three-eighths of its beauty". Two of ''The Simpsons''' showrunners, Bill Oakley and

Josh Weinstein Josh Weinstein (born May 5, 1966) is an American television writer and producer, known for his work on the animated comedy series ''The Simpsons''. Weinstein and Bill Oakley became best friends and writing partners at St. Albans School; Weinst ...

, have used Frinkiac on a regular basis for

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

posts.

Development history

Reception

References

External links