Some Genius Legend Has Made A Simpsons Search Engine, Matching Quotes With Their Screencaps

Tell us you love Punkee without telling us you love Punkee. Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram and Twitter. It'll mean the world.

The Simpsons has been running for so long, that there are unimaginable numbers of quotes that we all know and love. How many times have you told your personal trainer “don’t make me run I’m full of chocolate” or told someone that “everything’s coming up Milhouse”?

INTRODUCING: The Frinkiac.

Created by hardcore fans of the Simpsons for hardcore fans of the Simpsons.

The Frinkiac (Frinkiac.com) is an amazing search engine put together to pair your favourite quote from The Simpsons with the correct screen cap, created by Sean Schulte, Paul Kehrer and Allie Young. The Frinkiac covers 15 seasons of the Simpsons quotes. That’s well over 7,000 minutes of quotes.

“We had the idea several years ago when we were quotingThe Simpsons at each other all day long, and it was surprisingly difficult to find an image of the scenes we were quoting on Google.”

The team of genius-legends thought of this idea quite a few years ago, but didn’t actually go into creating the search engine until about six months ago. Lovingly named after Springfield’s most notable inventor-scientist, the search engine has been working for a few months but was only made public recently. Before then the Frinkiac was mainly shared with the team’s co-workers and friends. Creator Schulte said in a post about the site –

“One thing I wasn’t expecting—or didn’t know how to think about—was how people other than us would search for things… We started from an almost encyclopedic memory of Simpsons quotes, which is kind of the basic unit of Thinking About The Simpsons for us. From seeing search queries, that’s not exactly common: many people seem to search for a description of the scene rather than just what is being said out loud.”

Paul Kehrer describes the function of the Frinkiac on the same blog post. Let’s take a look under the bonnet.

The Frinkiac parses episodes and generates screen captures. It attempts to determine what are relevant screens to capture in a fairly naïve way:

  • Cut the scene into 100 equal-size buckets.
  • Take the average color of each bucket.
  • Compare that color to the corresponding bucket from the previously-saved image.
  • If the total difference is large enough, save the image.
  • Continue until all the frames of the episode have been inspected.

The team behind Frinkiac are planning to add more to the search engines functionality. Currently, when you search a character’s name, you’ll find quotes where that character is mentioned, opposed to a quote that they have said. Also there is currently no easy way to share the screen caps of the quotes unless you are actually screen capping the search result yourself; so Facebook and twitter sharing options are next on the creator’s to do list.

All we can say is – THANK JEBUS for this amazing creation. We can’t wait to see what else the crew at Frinkiac come up with.