You can do it on macOS as well, it has the same API for fast high quality OCR. I used it to create an OCR system to detect secrets or credentials in screencasts: https://github.com/peterc/videocr
Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
131–140 of 154 posts
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#132Although not as elegant a solution as this I've also tried my hand as well at indexing and categorizing memes. I wanted to save a very specific type of meme though since there are, in my mind, 2 main categories of memes. The first category are what I call "story" memes, they are standalone and typically what you see being shared on Facebook. They usually have text and are able to tell a story on their own with no add…
These different approaches really compliment each other - most of the memes you've categorised are used in a variety of situations and therefore not suited to text searching. Meanwhile if you're looking for a specific meme that you've seen, text search is the way to go.
Ideally there would be a best of both worlds where you could search memes by "characters" or "formats" in addition to text.
As feedback, it would be nice to search all memes from the homepage. The search on https://www.memeatlas.com/meme-templates.html also seems to be broken.
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#133Love the hackiness of this - however, the vision framework is available on Desktop macs as well - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision and specifically: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision/vnrecognize...
There's ocrit, a CLI utility using Apple's Vision framework for OCR: https://github.com/insidegui/ocrit
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
The use case for the meme database is slightly different: it's to find that meme you saw somewhere else . Local search isn't enough then. Though I share your feelings somewhat - I was completely surprised by what you wrote in the comment higher up about iPhone gallery search. I didn't realize this is possible in a reliable fashion, much less off-line and deployed in a mass market device.
> The use case for the meme database is slightly different: it's to find that meme you saw somewhere else. The whole idea is that whenever you find a meme you like you save it, so all search is still local
Just like we meticulously remember to catalog every song, movie, joke, or otherwise informative sensory input we’ve ever been exposed to?
I know the obvious response to the above will be “yes, really, teens do that. Pictures of everything”
But really? Everything?
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if there might be something in the Apple TOS prohibiting this.
I think there is right? At least assuming it's the same as Macs where the minimum billing period is 1 day, because you're technically renting a physical Mac (and 1d is the minimum that qualifies as adhering to that).
I was more referring to bundling up an OS framework library feature and exposing it as an Internet API.
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#136This is the single bestest thing I have read in a long while. Absolute madness. Pure bliss.
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#137Looks like you've solved the OCR problem, now to solve the duplication problem and use it as a ranking hint. :-)
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills in this thread. Am I the only one who talks to Gen Z kids who explore around their iPhone apps? This definitely isn’t the best option given price requirements. It’s not even the most convenient option. I’m around age 30, not 13, so similar to the article, my first instinct was also to create a database and OCR the image. But by total coincidence, yesterday I had a conversation with…
The entire point is to find memes you don't already have .
No, it's not. The author even mentions private memes that are in-jokes. He built a service that can be used to explore memes, but people generally don't search for new memes in a search engine. They tend to use the search engine to find memes they already have.
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you solve sourcing and distribution using just iOS though? Sure, it's built into iPhones, but if you want to create a comprehensive globally accessible meme search I don't think you can do that by saving memes to your iPhone.
A kid doesn’t care about that. They just save the memes they like, including the custom ones that their friend made which doesn’t make any sense to anyone else. You don’t need a comprehensive global search engine, if you have a tool that will tell you exact personalized answers to images you’ve saved before. And kids these days save everything; it’s like how people use Gmail, no point in deleting if you just archive.…
Your cousin and your friends don't care about that, not sure if it applies to all kids worldwide honestly. I'm sure "meme collecting" is a common practice among many teens, but I don't think it means that every teen saves all meme/images they encounter.
You know that some teens don't even save some images? They store them on specific instagram accounts they make for a specific category. My cousin had an instagram account for close friends (5 people) where she only shared bad things that happened to her during the day. Another one for nice things, etc. All those memories were recorded in app and never saved in the device, only stored as stories on the account. Guess what? She was sad a while ago because somehow she lost access to one of this accounts and so to all those pictures/videos.
Also the fact that some teens save a lot of pics on their devices doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things. In 2008 I had folders upon folders of images downloaded from the internet. Now i'm not even sure where they are, probably in some hard drive in some closet. You can be sure that if i remember any of those contents I won't dig up my hard drive, but google them (use a comprehensive global search engine). We have no idea where all this collected data from teens will be in 15 years, it's not unlikely that it will be lost or archived in hard to reach places and forgotten. I've stumbled some times into "meme dumps" where they upload all their memes to a service to free space on their device/icloud.
For sure teens use technology in ways that might be unexpected and counter-intuitive to us, but I don't think that invalidates in the slightly the need of a global search engine for memes. It's a good idea if i want to find a meme that I saw, a need that I don't think will disappear anytime and that's also not a millennial+ only problem.
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The use case for the meme database is slightly different: it's to find that meme you saw somewhere else. The whole idea is that whenever you find a meme you like you save it, so all search is still local
Just like we meticulously remember to catalog every song, movie, joke, or otherwise informative sensory input we’ve ever been exposed to? I know the obvious response to the above will be “yes, really, teens do that. Pictures of everything” But really? Every thing?
Complete supposition: maybe teens' exposition to memes is through non-private messengers and apps, meaning all media is saved automatically on the phone and available through a search. I don't think the web is very much used still.