[HN Gopher] Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine
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       Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine
        
       Author : Arubis
       Score  : 84 points
       Date   : 2022-07-20 16:37 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (michaelyingling.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (michaelyingling.com)
        
       | unfunco wrote:
       | I searched for "Somehow, it's always right now until it's later."
       | and it found nothing, I checked on
       | http://www.s-anand.net/comic.calvin.jsz and it's "Somehone, it's
       | always right now until it's later." - it's not very forgiving.
        
       | jkingsman wrote:
       | If anyone else is looking for the dataset, it appears here:
       | http://www.s-anand.net/comic.calvin.jsz
        
         | irrational wrote:
         | I don't think this is correct. For instance, if I search for
         | Susie, it finds Susie comics even when she isn't mentioned by
         | name.
         | 
         | For instance, the first comic with her has this information
         | 
         | Script Here comes that new girl. Hey Susie Derkins, is that
         | your face, or is a 'possum stuck in your collar? I hope you
         | suffer a debilitating brain aneurysm, you freak! She's cute,
         | isn't she?? Go away. Description Calvin sees the new girl
         | coming and yells a question asking if that's Susie Derkins'
         | face or if a possum is stuck in her collar. He then yells that
         | she should have a debilitating brain aneurysm. Hobbes says
         | she's cute, to which Calvin wants Hobbes to go away.
         | 
         | None of which is in the dataset you listed.
        
       | optimalsolver wrote:
       | Calvin & Hobbes & Dune (Calvin & Muad'Dib):
       | 
       | https://calvinanddune.tumblr.com/
        
         | Arubis wrote:
         | This is incredible; thank you!
        
       | fzliu wrote:
       | I remember this from a while back - good to bring back memories.
       | This may be a bit excessive, but using CLIP
       | (https://towhee.io/image-text-embedding/clip) or some other
       | multimodal learning model in conjunction with Milvus
       | (https://milvus.io) could make for a search engine that takes the
       | graphics into consideration as well. Not sure how well it would
       | work for comics, but it could make for a pretty unique weekend
       | hack.
        
       | aargh_aargh wrote:
       | Thanks, you insensitive clod!
        
       | racl101 wrote:
       | Cool!
       | 
       | Wish there was one of these for Archie comics.
        
         | bombcar wrote:
         | I use one for Penny Arcade: https://pipefour.org/pa/
         | 
         | https://inducks.org covers the Disney Duck universe (think:
         | Carl Barks, Don Rosa, et al) but it isn't full-text, mainly
         | metadata.
        
       | sp332 wrote:
       | This page is great and I've used it for years. One thing to note
       | is the underlying data (from gocomics) is not always accurate,
       | and sometimes you will end up on a comic that does not match the
       | search. Sometimes you can find the one you're looking for by
       | browsing about a week out in either direction. If you email
       | Yingling about it with the correct date or URL, he'll update the
       | database.
        
       | acheron wrote:
       | I use this all the time to pull up C&H references.
       | 
       | Here's a favorite one I found by searching for "townsfolk" (in
       | fact one of two strips that has that word):
       | https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/10/06
        
         | flanbiscuit wrote:
         | I found my favorite one right away by searching "snowmen" and
         | clicking on the first result:
         | https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1988/02/28
        
         | damagednoob wrote:
         | I quote this one pretty regularly:
         | https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/01/02
        
       | teddyh wrote:
       | See also: http://www.ohnorobot.com/
        
       | 0xbadcafebee wrote:
       | Looked up "munch", seems like script doesn't match comic for a
       | couple of 'em
        
       | gk1 wrote:
       | > Your search returned no results.Remember that it searches for
       | the EXACT phrase you typed! (And dates must be of the format
       | MM/DD/YYYY)
       | 
       | Requiring an exact search is fairly prohibitive. For example I
       | searched for "feeling frustrated" and got the above error,
       | despite 100% certainty there are strips about feeling frustrated.
       | You (or someone) could update this to search by semantics and not
       | by keyword, using a combination of SBERT (or similar model) + a
       | vector database: https://www.pinecone.io/docs/examples/semantic-
       | text-search/
        
         | dakial1 wrote:
         | Felt the same way. Some off the shelf algorithms would do
         | wonders here. More sophisticated ML to tag (image and themes)
         | would be awesomely overkill.
        
         | bombcar wrote:
         | Or allow people to tag strips, etc.
        
           | dylan604 wrote:
           | shudders at the thought of what "people" would contribute
        
         | marginalia_nu wrote:
         | I think this is serious overkill, like you can get a way with
         | simple stemming.
        
           | leobg wrote:
           | Or lemmatization and BM25. Often better than SBERT in my
           | experience when using it out of the box.
        
           | snapdeus wrote:
           | I believe there is built in stemming in this search.
           | 
           | I searched the key word "commit" and some results were
           | returned with the word "committed"
           | 
           | My guess is this guy just set up a simple DB query on the
           | search form and left it at that.
           | 
           | That's what I've done in the past for simple text search.
           | 
           | I know that at least mongodb comes with built in full text
           | search and stemming.
           | 
           | What he really should do is set up elastic search but that's
           | a big pita to learn all that
        
       | ComputerCat wrote:
       | This is so cute! I have all the collections and absolutely love
       | Calvin & Hobbes. Definitely brings back some memories!
        
       | irrational wrote:
       | Outstanding. I wish it could display the actual strips, but I
       | understand why it cannot. I can't even imagine how much work it
       | must have taken to compile the metadata for this.
        
       | sharps_xp wrote:
       | i've been thinking of doing something similar but for anime and
       | with semantic search (ie., "rudeous getting punched") but i have
       | concerns about DMCA notices. I also know that search engines have
       | a different set of rules for copyright liability but i couldn't
       | make sense of them since IANAL.
       | 
       | I might just make it for myself and call it a day.
        
       | forrestbrazeal wrote:
       | I immediately searched "Weltanschauung", and was not
       | disappointed.
        
       | madcaptenor wrote:
       | Looked up "amendment", which I thought of after I had COVID last
       | Christmas. It finds 6/16/90
       | (https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/06/16) which is
       | what I was looking for.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Related:
       | 
       |  _Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26119380 - Feb 2021 (163
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Calvin & Hobbes Search Engine_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1600211 - Aug 2010 (27
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Calvin & Hobbes "Search Engine"_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1600151 - Aug 2010 (5
       | comments)
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-20 23:02 UTC)