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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

#91

Love 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...

> My preliminary speed tests were fairly slow on my Macbook. However, once I deployed the app to an actual iPhone the speed of OCR was extremely promising (possibly due to the Vision framework using the GPU). I was then able to perform extremely accurate OCR on thousands of images in no time at all, even on the budget iPhone models like the 2nd gen SE.

He does mention running it on a macbook

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#93
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do this back in 2021! https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/copy-paste-text-from-photos... 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. If you’re a typical tech person, you probably look at this, go “oh, iOS Photos now OCRs every photo. Cool, that’s 2000 or 2010 era fancy tech, boring these days. And then a search…

> 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.

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#94

Love 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...

> My preliminary speed tests were fairly slow on my Macbook. However, once I deployed the app to an actual iPhone the speed of OCR was extremely promising (possibly due to the Vision framework using the GPU). I was then able to perform extremely accurate OCR on thousands of images in no time at all, even on the budget iPhone models like the 2nd gen SE. He does mention running it on a macbook

I would guess that tests in this sentence refers to tests of the iOS app on the simulator.

Which would be slow expectedly

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#95
post #21

Nice project, I wanted to build meme search engine myself one day, but figured Tesseract will fail at most of the memes because of how stylized those have become. So I tuned down my meme source to only /r/bertstrips as those contain sane looking text and it's working quite alright - project has no frontend yet, I search from cli and click links. > Initial testing with the Postgres Full Text Search indexing functional…

One issue I've had with postgres full text search is when you want to rank using ts_rank you end up with a full table scan.

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#96
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My preliminary speed tests were fairly slow on my Macbook. However, once I deployed the app to an actual iPhone the speed of OCR was extremely promising (possibly due to the Vision framework using the GPU). I was then able to perform extremely accurate OCR on thousands of images in no time at all, even on the budget iPhone models like the 2nd gen SE. He does mention running it on a macbook

I would guess that tests in this sentence refers to tests of the iOS app on the simulator. Which would be slow expectedly

I would think it would run well on a M1/M2 Mac as a native app though, right?

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#97
Although 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 additional context and can be presented as a single post, story, etc, (think 4 panel comics). The second type are reaction memes. These are used to respond to people and usually convey a feeling towards a post or tweet. They can also be standalone so they should probably be considered a subset of the "story" memes. I've gravitated towards the reaction memes as I see more utility in them and can be used in a more universal way. My site if anyone is interested (its still a work in progress):

https://www.memeatlas.com

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#98

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) :)

What about copyright?

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#100
post #70

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…

The entire point is to find memes you don't already have.
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