One site. Fifteen seasons. Three million searchable screengrabs. This is the wonder that is Frinkiac, a compendium of Simpsons moments frozen in time, and the latest, best, most perfectly cromulent way to waste time on the Internet.

Update, May 12th: Frinkiac now offers GIFs in addition to screengrabs. Everything else is the same; you search a term, brings back frames, you can add text to "meme" them. Now, though, you can also create a GIF of up to four seconds, which adds up to about 19 Frinkiac frames. They take just a few seconds to process, after which there are easy-share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Please use this power responsibly!

Frinkiac, named after Springfield’s favorite eccentric scientist, Professor Frink, landed on the Internet yesterday with all the subtlety of a Lard Lad Donuts mascot. It collects every quote from the first 15 seasons of The Simpsons, the most quotable show of the last two decades, and pairs them with screenshots from the exact moment they happened.

"We had the idea several years ago when we were quoting The Simpsons at each other all day long, and it was surprisingly difficult to find an image of the scenes we were quoting on Google," says Sean Schulte, who created Frinkiac with Paul Kehrer and Allie Young. Though they kicked the idea around for awhile, they didn't decide until six months or so ago to actually build it.

The work went surprisingly quickly. "The majority of the code was written in about a week, to parse the video files and upload them to the server and index them and search them," says Schulte. From there, Young spent a few weeks developing and tweaking the UI. And so Frinkiac was born.

In a post describing what’s under the hood, Kehrer outlines the process by which this brilliant bit of coding generates screen captures. While he describes it as “fairly naive,” it’s also fairly brilliant. Frinkiac cuts every scene into 100 parts, takes the average color of each part, and compares its coloration to the most recently saved image. If they’re different enough, voila!, new screenshot, with minimal redundancy through the hundreds of hours of video being parsed.

To match the resulting screenshots with the right quote, Frinkiac parses subtitle files as well, and lines up time codes between words and images. Kehrer notes that season 11 has “a significant time skew problem,” making it hard to track down the precise moment Professor Frink mutters “for glaven out loud” at Lucy Lawless. A loss, but not an irredeemable one.

"For the last several months it's been complete," says Kehrer, "but we've just used it with coworkers and friends."

Thank goodness they made it public. The demise of Frank Grimes? Frinkiac's got it. Beer as the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems? You bet. I bent my Wookie? Darn right I did. For each of these searches, Frinkiac doesn’t return just a single, representative shot. It offers a range from which to choose. Ralph Wiggums’ “Wookie” moment spits back 10 frames from that scene alone, along with several partial matches from other episodes.

The fun continues! Once you find the exact right Comic Book Guy still, you can “Meme It,” transposing the quote (in Simpsons font, natch) onto the screenshot. Since the quote search engine is a bit of a blunt instrument, you can also fine-tune the words on your meme, editing out the chaff to isolate the glorious wheat of “Don’t make me run! I’m full of chocolate.”

There’s no easy way to share from there, which is a shame, but you can always screenshot the screenshot. Screenshot inception! In fact, the feature set pretty much taps out there, aside from being able to view an entire episode’s worth of quotes, which is both helpful for uncovering forgotten gems and also a very strange, choppy, scrolling way to process a Simpsons episode.

The team already has plans to add some Frinkiac functionality. "We have lots of ideas, but much of it is geared around trying to make the search "'smarter,'" says Kehrer. "For instance, we commonly see heterographs in searches (e.g. breaks vs. brakes). Google is smart enough to handle this sort of thing, but currently Frinkiac is not." Schulte, meanwhile, says sharing functions like Twitter cards and Facebook Open Graph support are at the top of his to-do list.

Frinkiac is clearly designed for (and, even more so, by) dedicated Simpsons fans. Strictly searching for dialog means that you can’t summon up every appearance of Fat Tony on a whim, just occasions where people are talking about him. To find the exact moment Fat Tony explains to Marge that his wife “has been most vocal on the subject of the pretzel monies,” you need to search for that exact quote, or a standout portion of it. The only character who's reliably easy to find is Duffman; because he talks about himself in third-person.

That's a byproduct of how Frinkiac was built, but also of how its creators relate to The Simpsons.

"One thing I wasn't expecting—or didn't know how to think about—was how people other than us would search for things," says Schulte. "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."

That said, there are more diehard Simpsons fans of the Kehrer/Schulte/Young variety out there than there are suckers in Shelbyville. And they are who Frinkiac is really for, the ones for whom random word searches can quickly turn into a tour down memory lane. Or, in this case, Evergreen Terrace.