Looks like no one wants a meme search by image
Very early in the journey I was building a meme search engine, because finding memes is hard. Meme is an emotion, and you can’t always describe it in words. So I bought https://iwantmemes.com/ and started coding a reverse image search on memes, as in you upload an image and it will find related memes from the database of memes. And all this without talking to the user first 😛. Now you know how the story proceeds…
This is an excerpt from my notes written on 1st March 2021.
I had a call with [Name Redacted] today. He is a high meme lord, he will come up with the greatest meme reactions on slack and whatsapp conversations. Key lesson is that the current meme search is useless to him.
Image search for meme is useless, because if you have the kind of image you looking for, you just use it after edititing it.
Second we don't have the kind of memes he is looking for, our current meme page has lot of crap. And the present method of scraping random twitter handles won't cut it. The tweets I scrapped are usually reactions to some current event or something else, which probably doesn't apply to [Name Redacted]'s situation.
The memes he usually uses are captured from movies, lot of times from Star Wars and Marvel movies.
What he does now:
Tries searching on google image search. You have to experiment with the query often. If you remember the meme name, you put that. If you remember the dialoge, you put it, or maybe put the actor name.
There are also meme template dumps on Imgur like this one https://imgur.com/gallery/f1zKJ which he uses sometimes. Also there are Facebook groups specifically for sharing meme templates.
For star war memes, he uses this site https://searchmoviequotes.com/starwars where you can put in dailouge, it give you them images for that star wars dialoge. So he uses that.
There are times when when he gone to the Amazon Prime/Netfix. Opened the movie wanted to send a meme from, spend 5-10 minutes finding the right scene. Then take a screen shot and put a caption to it.
See he puts in so much effort, most people just give up. Curious enough, he said he don't need a meme search because his meme search workflow has become quite optimized by now.
What can still be useful is to tag meme images by movie name + actor names and put a filter on it. Ofcourse along with text search.
There is another very different usecase, where marketers want to keep a tab on memes (both text and images) which are trending. So that they can ride the wave and make relatable marketing content.
So go distribution first, make sure your work is useful to someone. If that someone is you, that’s great, you understand your needs the best! That’s why the first step in our onboarding guide asks new joinees to change their default search engine to Neera 😄