Say what you will about the longevity of the series, but The Simpsons is an overwhelmingly large cultural icon. The show has set plenty of endurance records since its debut in 1989, and we're currently on its 27th season with no end in sight.

With so many episodes—more than 550 in total—it can be hard for a casual-to-semi-obsessed fan to remember exactly which episodes featured your favorite parts, bits, skits, or spoofs. And if you're the kind of person who likes to pepper your online life with Simpsons references, searching for an image of that one, special moment you want to share can feel a bit needle-in-haystack.

Well, at least, it did. Simpsons fans Sean Schulte, Paul Kehrer, and Allie Young created a search engine called Frinkiac, in honor of the nerdy professor who frequently makes cameos on the show (unintelligible speech patterns and all). To put it simply, the search engine is the ultimate Simpsons images reference tool.

"Frinkiac is a search engine for Simpsons quotes. It contains nearly 3 million screenshots (every episode from season 1 through 151) indexed by the quote they are associated with and has a variety of features to help you find the exact screenshot you're looking for. Once you've found it you can share it with your friends or make a quick meme. Never again find yourself wishing you could pinpoint the second his heart rips in half. You'll feel like god must feel when he's holding a gun," reads a blog post from Kehrer.

That sounds like a lot of work, but it actually didn't take the three very long to come up with Frinkiac. As Schulte explained to Wired, it only took a week or so to write the code that powers the whole thing. After that, they spent a few weeks tweaking the UI of the site, but that's about it.

As for how Frinkiac works, every single scene in a Simpsons episode gets cut into 100 different parts. An algorithm measures how much each part differs from the previous; if there's enough of a change, Frinkiac takes a new screenshot and continues the process. So, you get a ton of screenshots of what could really be a great Simpsons (digital) flip book without a bunch of annoying duplicate images.

"The index is constructed by taking the words from each subtitle and breaking them into prefixes (with a minimum length of two characters). So when you start searching you can get instantaneous results: typing 'ill' is a prefix for 'illegal', 'illegitimate', and 'ill-gotten,'" Kehrer writes.

"The more you type, the more accurate your search becomes. For example, 'kill anyone who looks' isn't accurate enough to find Rex Banner, so keep typing, 'kill anyone who looks at me cockeyed' to find the scene. Of course...it turns out that was the only scene in which the Simpsons ever said 'cockeyed'."

Further Reading

Software & Service Reviews