Comic search by text/dialogue?

Animal Spirits

The comic search is practically useless unless you know the title (which is not very descriptive). I recently wanted to bring up the King Kong one but don't have hours to dig. I think it would be much easier if the search dug through the text/dialogue in the comics, as I always remember at least a line or two. I realize this would require a lot of work, but maybe the community could help do the old ones (like we make a thread and post text/date), and it could just be put in by whoever every time a new one pops up. PA has a huge and amazing back library, but it is crippled by the difficult search. Or is this just a plot to sell those books?

TDL

I would be willing to add the dialogue of a few hundred comics to a database. If Alpha decides to do something like this all he needs to do is shoot me a PM and I'll get cracking.

Animal Spirits

TDL wrote:

I would be willing to add the dialogue of a few hundred comics to a database. If Alpha decides to do something like this all he needs to do is shoot me a PM and I'll get cracking.

Obviously, I would be willing to do some too.

robaal

Ryan North from Dinosaur Comics made http://www.ohnorobot.com which is supposed to do what you suggest, so it would only need to be implamented...

Ramius

the fulltext is not captured, but an almost equally good keyword database DOES exist. It just hasn't been implemented

Starfuck

The keywords used to be little text that hovered over the comics when you viewed them at one point didn't they?
some of them made no sense, but were pretty funny

Animal Spirits

Ramius wrote:

the fulltext is not captured, but an almost equally good keyword database DOES exist. It just hasn't been implemented

Yeah, I guess that would probably be good, for comics where the subject isn't in the text exactly. Keyword + fulltext = ?

Golem

id be willing to help

torgie

I've got a bunch of database experience - I currently work at a company coding web applications in PHP/MySQL. I've also got a webcomic of my own with a very effective search engine behind it, but I don't care to put a link here. *shrug* Let me know. With a little brute force data-entry I could have that something up and running in a week

Animal Spirits

torgie wrote:

I've got a bunch of database experience - I currently work at a company coding web applications in PHP/MySQL. I've also got a webcomic of my own with a very effective search engine behind it, but I don't care to put a link here. *shrug* Let me know. With a little brute force data-entry I could have that something up and running in a week

Wow. That's a pretty generous offer. Now we just need an admin to give us access or whatever.

The Tommy

There is a Firefox extension for PA that has tagging, and I'm guessing eventually the developer will add tag searching, but the dev dropped off the face of the earth or something.

Fake edit: it's a greasemonkey script. I'll try to find the website.

Real edit: http://phasetwo.org/pennypacker/ has the search tag. And I found your strip: http://phasetwo.org/pennypacker/tag/kong

mcc

I think that when they redid the interface they accidentally forgot the database of search tags or something.

stilist

The Tommy wrote:

There is a Firefox extension for PA that has tagging, and I'm guessing eventually the developer will add tag searching, but the dev dropped off the face of the earth or something.

Fake edit: it's a greasemonkey script. I'll try to find the website.

Real edit: http://phasetwo.org/pennypacker/ has the search tag. And I found your strip: http://phasetwo.org/pennypacker/tag/kong

PennyPacker is quite handy for this sort of thing. Not all the strips have been tagged yet, but I'd guess about half or so have something.

anson

The Tommy wrote:

There is a Firefox extension for PA that has tagging, and I'm guessing eventually the developer will add tag searching, but the dev dropped off the face of the earth or something.

Fake edit: it's a greasemonkey script. I'll try to find the website.

Real edit: http://phasetwo.org/pennypacker/ has the search tag. And I found your strip: http://phasetwo.org/pennypacker/tag/kong

Hey, I'm that lost developer! Actually today I have just released Pennypacker as a Firefox extension, so Greasemonkey is no longer needed.

I am fairly open to adding new functionality but I'm not sure about adding dialogue to the database -- this may be seen as cutting PA's lunch. Dunno, is there a demand for this?

torgie

I've been developing a mock search page that I'm going to show you guys in a bit here... It has full dialogue search, keywords, etc.

For example, if you search on PA's engine for "Darth Maul", you got zero results. On mine, you get:

Inspired by the movie! -> 1999/06/09

And when you search for "blood", you (again) get zero results on the PA search, but on mine:

A Bloody Birthday -> 1999/02/10
Video Violence -> 1998/12/09

You get the idea. I only have the first 100 comics in there, so the result sets are still a bit small... If you want, after I'm done putting them all into my database, I could export out a CSV that you could use on your extension. The extension is certainly cool, but I think it's also absolutely necessary to have a working on-site search for a comic as robust and long-lived as PA.

Lemming

I find it really easy to put what you remember best from it, like "king kong" after site:www.penny-arcade.com, then add -forum because it is really easy to find something from here, as well

For example, site:penny-arcade.com king kong -forum

You find it on the second one

Animal Spirits

â„¢ wrote:

The Tommy wrote:

There is a Firefox extension for PA that has tagging, and I'm guessing eventually the developer will add tag searching, but the dev dropped off the face of the earth or something.

Fake edit: it's a greasemonkey script. I'll try to find the website.

Real edit: http://phasetwo.org/pennypacker/ has the search tag. And I found your strip: http://phasetwo.org/pennypacker/tag/kong

Hey, I'm that lost developer! Actually today I have just released Pennypacker as a Firefox extension, so Greasemonkey is no longer needed.

I am fairly open to adding new functionality but I'm not sure about adding dialogue to the database -- this may be seen as cutting PA's lunch. Dunno, is there a demand for this?

Really a pretty elegant solution. I am sated.