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Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

findthatmeme.com

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Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#141

Post by TeMPOraL »

duccinator wrote: post #93
TeMPOraL wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really want to emphasize how insane this situation is, because I think most tech people won’t realize what’s happening unless it’s pointed out. Count me in. If you asked me about the OCR itself, I'd probably say "yeah, it's mostly been solved for a good decade for print books and articles, but it's unreliable enough". I somehow never considered OCR might have gone better - possibly because my main exposure was th…

There is a chance that your photos are being backed up by some cloud service and being removed from your gallery. The most likely suspect is Google Photos. Note that Google photos not only OCRs, but it also does a visual search of objects, faces, scenery etc. and is extremely powerful.

> There is a chance that your photos are being backed up by some cloud service and being removed from your gallery. The most likely suspect is Google Photos.

I have Google Photos upload and backup both disabled.

But then, I'm pretty sure either Google or Samsung SMS app had a "feature" to automatically delete old messages (for a definition of "old" that was neither specified, nor configurable), and it defaulted to ON on my current phone, likely costing me significant chunk of my message archive (that I dutifully transferred over from the previous phone) before I accidentally found and disabled the switch.

So yeah, could be Google Photos deleting it. Or someone else. I don't trust Android as a platform anymore.

BTW. about this "delete old messages" "feature" - most likely this was implemented for performance reasons. But the thing is, you're unlikely to send or receive enough SMS in your whole life for it to take a noticeable amount of space. The irony here is, I do remember a case where the messaging app would become slow and laggy if you had enough texts stored on the phone - but that was solely because someone implemented the message list as a linked list, thus adding a O(N) multiplier to many GUI operations.

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#142

Post by TeMPOraL »

rakoo wrote: post #86
TeMPOraL wrote: post #84

Earlier 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

Yes, and the database is useful for all the situations when you saw a meme on someone else's device, or embedded in some piece of content, so you had no way to save it.

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#143

Post by spiffytech »

mandatory wrote: post #10
aemreunal wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Not the author) Maybe they leveraged https://knowyourmeme.com/ ? But that can't possibly have all the random memes, could it?

Author here: KnowYourMeme is one of many sites that memes are continually ingested from (any site that has memes I try to ingest regularly) :)

How do you ingest your social circle's in-group memes? Are they reliably posted to meme generator sites?

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#144

Post by astrange »

GistNoesis wrote: post #46
mandatory wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here: KnowYourMeme is one of many sites that memes are continually ingested from (any site that has memes I try to ingest regularly) :)

Nice IPhone cluster. Have you tried something based on deep-learning that uses Transformers : https://github.com/roatienza/deep-text-recognition-benchmark (available weights are for tasks that seem similar to OCR so there is a good chance you can use it out of the box). With a good gpu it should process hundreds to thousands image per seconds, so you likely can build your index in less than a day. (Maybe you can even…

You can do better than a general image-to-text model reading memes, because they all use the same fonts - so you want something trained off synthetic data made with that font.

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#145

Post by spiffytech »

CiceroCiceronis wrote: post #74

This is really brilliant to see, and I've been surprised for quite a long time that nothing similar exists. I think it's a real shame that few people with interest in memes have interest in building solutions like this that help us engage with them. People in the 21st century know a lot about the mistakes of the past century that led to much popular culture of the time being lost (especially terminally online people…

I've always been surprised that Reddit hasn't built meme search into its site search.

Memes are a core part of the Reddit experience, yet it's difficult to find something I know I saw before.

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#146

Post by astrange »

MrGilbert wrote: post #2

This is remarkable. I'd love to see that combined with some kind of sentiment analysis like Microsoft offers, just to see if something useful comes out of it. Sometimes, I don’t know the exact words when looking for a meme, but once I see it, I know that’s the one.

Unfortunately semantic analysis barely works at the best of times, but it especially doesn't work here. Computers… they're just not good at irony.

IME CLIP embedding search can work strangely on memes as well, because it gets confused when images have words in them. Basically the same problem reported in the original CLIP paper where it thinks an apple and a piece of paper with "apple" written on it are the same thing.

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#147

Post by counttheforks »

jychang wrote: post #138
counttheforks wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

knowing != having

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#148

Post by djmips »

jychang wrote: post #70
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah but lots of things that work are stupid because there are many other solutions that work better, the greatness of this crazy solution is it really seems like the best solution given price requirements.

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…

Well maybe this isn't for teenagers with iphones

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#150

Post by remram »

lormayna wrote: post #44

If you don't need advanced search features, you can use Sonic ( https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic ). It's blazing fast and you can save lot of money on servers.

Someone mentioned lnx.rs in this thread, how does it compare? And how about all the other new Rust solutions like MeiliSearch, Toshi, Quickwit?
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