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'?:
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Thousand words and more
Labels:
Abhishek Ghose
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abstract
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image scraping
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imagemagick
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pictures
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Ruby
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scraping
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9 comments :
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
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...
Try google image labeler....
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
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 .
Almost forgot to thank my only regular reader :D ... thanks Akshay!
Amazing !!!!!! I really liked the way you presented it...
Thanks Disha... nice to know you're still visiting :) Keep doing so!
a very novel and interesting idea
thanks raghu... :) if u remember, this is actually the a very stunted form of the original idea :P ---stunted of course, by my lethargy...
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