Cool Web Comics Search Engine

I don't want to mix my bread and butter here, and I promise not to do this too often, but I managed to win-dingle an interview with Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics for my personal blog, Invisible Ink.

He talked about a rather cool tool he developed at ohnorobot.com, which is a Web comic search engine:

OhNoRobot.com is a site that makes Web comics searchable. The reason you can’t use Google that well is that it works entirely off text. So while it’s pretty good for finding a comic series (say, Dinosaur Comics), if you want to find the Dinosaur Comic in which T-Rex says “We can sexy”, Google’s probably not going to be much help - all that dialogue is locked up in the image, which to Google might as well be a black box. (Optical Character Recognition is time-consuming, unreliable, and expensive - at least right now).
So what Oh No Robot does is something I came up with called “distributed transcription”: if your comic hasn’t been transcribed yet, it’ll make a little button link beneath your image, and whichever one of your readers feels charitable that day transcribes it. The task is spread out across an army of volunteers, so you, as a comic owner, get a search engine quickly, the fans get to give a little back, and Oh No Robot gets to make comics searchable. It’s a pretty much win-win-win situation!

That's pretty cool. I'm not sure I have the personal need to look for an individual Web comic, per se, but it is nice to know that tool is out there. I could see it being quite handy if you wanted to quickly find something from an archive that you remembered being funny -- so long as that particular comic had been added to this database.

Go check it out: ohnorobot.com. You can also check out the rest of my interview with Ryan here.

( Add your comments )

Recent Entries:
· The Rebirth of Hip-Hop? Right...
· Cloud Computing: The Buzz and Blur
· Spore: Inner Feelings from Outer Space

[ READER COMMENTS ]

(Note: separate multiple email addresses with commas)

Cool Web Comics Search Engine

Add your comments...

We kindly ask that you keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Abusive or inappropriate comments or comments that are specifically promotional in nature may be removed.