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| Created by | Paul Kehrer, Sean Schulte, Allie Young |
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| URL | www |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | No |
| Launched | February 2, 2016 |
| Written in | Go |
Frinkiac is a website for users to search for words or phrases from episodes of the Americananimated sitcomThe Simpsons. It returns screenshots related to the search terms, from which it generatesmemes andanimated GIFs. 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. The site was critically acclaimed upon its launch, andNewsweek wrote: "It may be the greatest feat of Internet engineering we've ever seen".[1] As of May 2016, screenshots from the first seventeen seasons ofThe Simpsons are in Frinkiac's database.
On August 8, 2016 the developers debutedMorbotron, a similar website forFuturama.[2] It was followed byMaster of All Science, aRick and Morty site in the same mold, on July 30, 2017.[3]
Paul Kehrer and Sean Schulte had the idea of a search engine for screenshots ofThe Simpsons 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 onGoogle.[4][5] Development of Frinkiac began around August 2015.[4] Most of Frinkiac's code, written with theGo language in a week,[4] determines which screenshot frame is most pertinent to the search term by cutting each scene into 100 buckets of matching size amount.[6] 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.[6] In addition to parsing episode video files withffmpeg and cgo, the code also analyzes subtitle files, matching the timecodes of the subtitles and the screenshots.[6]
After a few weeks with Allie Young creating theuser interface, the three people involved in making Frinkiac tested it with their relatives but didn't launch it for public use until February 2, 2016,[4][5] starting with almost three million screenshots from episodes of the show's first fifteen seasons.[6] On May 15, 2016, Frinkiac was updated with the addition of 201,877 screenshots and 21,444 subtitles for episodes from thesixteenth andseventeenth seasons ofThe Simpsons. The GIF loop time limit was also increased to seven seconds, because, as Kehrer joked: "it was derived from my desire to seeGrandpa walk in circles at the burlesque house entrance".[7] Kehrer also announced some features for the site that were in the works, such asmp4 andWebMs 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.[7] 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.[5]
Frinkiac garnered critical acclaim upon its launch.[8][9] ANewsweek 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".[1] AnEngadget writer said: "As someone who referencesThe 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."[10]
Marie Boran ofThe Irish Times praised the site's use of theSimpsons font for the text of meme images.[11] When reviewing the site upon its February 2016 launch, Hannah Hawkins writing forJunkee, 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".[12] The May 2016 addition of the GIF feature was also significantly praised by journalists.[13][14]
AsCNET's Claire Reilly wrote, "a million poets could try for a million years and still describe but three-eighths of its beauty".[15] Two ofThe Simpsons' showrunners,Bill Oakley andJosh Weinstein, have used Frinkiac on a regular basis forTwitter posts.[16]
