Created: 16 Oct 2013,
last rebuilt: 07 Dec 2015
Searchable archive of Dilbert strips
Dilbert search was online from 2008 to 2013.
I loved the strips and found many of them hilarious, but I could never find the one that perfectly illustrated some situation. There was no online Dilbert index or transcript back then, so my plan was to:
- procure the archive of all the strips by crawling the Dilbert site
- do some fancy OCR and build an index
I never got to it. I did try the OCR on a couple of strips, but it was basically useless.
Then I stumbled upon a torrent of more than 2k strips, and somewhere else I found the transcripts. After a couple of hours of filename wrangling and text cleaning, everything was set. The files resided in an S3 bucket, while a simple MySQL table served for full-text search and returned nothing but a list of urls wrapped inside <img> tags.
Some screenshots below.
