Calvin & Hobbes Search Engine | Hacker News Reader

Calvin & Hobbes Search Engine

michaelyingling.com

73 pointsdasil00327 comments

I run the Cool Calvin and Hobbes Collection - http://calvinandhobbes.me - and as one of the very early fan sites have seen many C&H fan sites come and go.

For most of the past 15 years, the most popular C&H site was Martijn Reemst's site which was truly comprehensive. Sadly that was taken down a few years ago because it featured a search engine. The same thing happened to S. Anand's fan site once they offered a search engine as well.

From what I have observed, in the late 90's Universal Press Syndicate was quite aggressive in pursuing C&H fan sites and getting them shutdown. However from 2000 onwards, they have taken a much more relaxed (enlightened?) approach with few C&H fan sites being pursued for copyright infringement. In fact, the only sites that I know that have been shutdown are those that have run search engines.

I've long been tempted to add such a search engine to my site as I've already got it all coded up and indexed already, but I'm quite fond of my site since it was the first website I ever created (and what started me on my IT career) and so don't want it shutdown.

It looks like he already received a cease and desist request:

  Someone at AMU got in touch with me; a C&D was (is?)
  headed my way, but they seem open to finding a better
  solution, which is AWESOME. You may see some changes here
  in the next few days/week, but hopefully it will be in the
  best interest of everyone!

(Click the "A note from Michael, the creator" link on the site to read the full text.)

I also just noticed that Marcello's site is now unavailable. Marcello had downloaded the entire collection of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips from the gocomic site and made it available for download on his site. I've been surprised that it's lasted for so many months without any C&D notices being sent.

However, Michaels' search engine mentions Marcello's website as the source of the images and it looks like that has drawn the attention of the AMU lawyers (unless it's simply overloaded from demand).

I wouldn't be surprised if the script on scribd is taken down soon either.

Hmm...could you sidestep that by just OCRing (or however) the text from the strips and putting it on the page, thereby allowing Google to index it and thus make it searchable? Or would they not allow that either?

Yup. I've actually been quite fascinated about the different ways to build my own C&H search engine and have implemented (but not publicly) it two ways - one of which was to do it the way you suggested.

I think from a 'will the publisher still it as copyright infringement' point of view, I think the answer is still yes if I host the text on my site. And so I haven't implemented my efforts as a result.

Usually this can be gotten around if you index the text, but don't display the text. This way you can still offer a search engine but not "publish" the text.

There used to be another search engine by S. Anand, but it was taken down because of copyright bullshit (http://www.s-anand.net/calvinandhobbes.html). Wonder what will happen with this one...

Here's his post about taking down the site: http://www.s-anand.net/blog/the-calvin-and-hobbes-search-tak...

Neat. An empty query brings up every strip:

http://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/search.p...

Your comment certainly contributed to bringing down the hosting.

Shrug. I think bad code had more to do with it.

This would be awesome if the website hosting the strips was actually up. Poor little sad broken image icons...

Wow, great idea with the Search engine. Hopefully it can stay around for a while.

I've got a C & H fan site up at http://dontknockmysmock.com. It gets pretty low traffic and so far I haven't gotten any notice to take it down.

I love Calvin and Hobbes but Watterson famously does not like these sorts of derivative works. Still, awesome service.

Service appears to be struggling to stay up.

Bill Watterson objected to derivative works - ie C&H baseball caps, cartoons, fridge magnets, bumper stickers, colouring in books etc.

A search engine isn't a derivative work (at least in the way that Watterson dislikes). The objections to the search engines come from the publisher under the guise of copyright infringement. I would assume that whilst they can turn a blind eye to a fan site with the occasional infringing comic strips, they can't turn a blind eye to a search engine which contains the entire script of C&H.

If that is so then what is with all the urinating Calvin stickers? Every time I see one I feel like my childhood is being wizzed on.

Those stickers are derivative work - unsanctioned and thoroughly frowned upon derivative work.

Nice. I did a quick search for my favorite strip and it came up as the first result:

http://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/search.p...

There's lots of quotable stuff in the Calvin & Hobbes universe. Nice to see there's finally a way to find it.

Need one of these for Bloom County next.

Here's my fave: http://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/search.p...

i have that exact comic posted on my cube wall.

I like how the search engine made by Bing :)

(Click on Why? to find out)

Might just be me, but in IE I get an auth login that never goes away...had to go through Task Manager to kill the browser.

Can't be the REAL C&H search engine: I tried typing in "Bill Watterson" in the box and got NO search results. Seriously? If there's one query to get right, it's that one.

Not really - the search engine is to search the Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. The strips never make any mention of Bill Watterson, so the fact you got zero results is completely accurate.

To split hairs, I imagine his signature could be found in most of the comics...

To split it even further, he only signed his strips as 'Watterson' and so a search for 'Bill Watterson' or 'Bill AND Watterson' should return zero results :P

about the fansites and the copyright, why don't the webmasters do that on stuff like onioncat ?

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