Thursday, June 5, 2008

Thousand words and more

I thought looking at the results of Google Image search for a few 'abstract' words would be interesting. So I wrote a screen scraping script in Ruby (this language is just great - the force is definitely deep with this one) that reads in search terms from a file and collects the searched images and their links from the first page of the image search results. The images were subsequently resized using ImageMagick. My list was:

Always, Bliss, Blossom, Blue, Bubble, Death, Delirium, Destiny, Dreams, Eternity, Fantastic, Happiness, Hilarious, Hope, If, Liberty, Life, Love, Nothingness, Rainbow, Smile, Sunflower, Sunshine, Time

And below are some of the results. The images are clickable - they lead you to the www links Google obtained them from. Note that Google returns 21 search results(images) on its first page in its default setting. In some cases I could'nt retrieve the images due to various technical snags that I was too lazy to spare any attention for. I am just putting up 5 or less per search word, in no particular order - ones that appeal to me or stand out in some way (and post censoring :) ) - you could ask me if I were a tyrant and I would say 42. So lets just get going:



Always:






Bliss:






Blossom:






Blue:






Bubble:







Death:






Delirium:







Destiny:






Dreams:






Eternity:






Fantastic:






Happiness:






Hilarious:






Hope:






If:






Liberty:






Life:






Love:






Nothingness:






Rainbow:






Smile:






Sunflower:






Sunshine:






Time:






And, finally, on a lighter note, can you believe Google turned up this while searching for 'bubble'?:

9 comments :

Aks said...

Woooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwww !!!
Spellbound absolutely :) How did you come up with such a splendid idea? Those pics are lovely... good work at creativity too apart from the tech approach that you always mar me with :P

Anurag Chugh said...

so i am here when i was wasting time..
i dont know you.. and you dont know me....

but i guess we both know upasna...

yeah i was wasting time on orkut...
so i succumb to levaving comments all over the blogs...

here goes...

Anurag Chugh said...

Try google image labeler....

http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

Abhishek Ghose said...

Image labeller interestingly is not a new concept and has its ancestor in the ESP game from CMU (Carnegie Mellon Univ). And anyway it is not retrieving anything for me (right now :) )- it labels, doesnt search .

Abhishek Ghose said...

Almost forgot to thank my only regular reader :D ... thanks Akshay!

Disha said...

Amazing !!!!!! I really liked the way you presented it...

Abhishek Ghose said...

Thanks Disha... nice to know you're still visiting :) Keep doing so!

Raghu said...

a very novel and interesting idea

Abhishek Ghose said...

thanks raghu... :) if u remember, this is actually the a very stunted form of the original idea :P ---stunted of course, by my lethargy...