Google, but for colors

[jfarlow]

Very fun.

I put in some scientific proteins, and it spits out their common fluorescence staining colors:

ZO1 (stain tight-junctions, often blue): https://picular.co/zo1 (see https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1399&bi...)

hN1 (a protein usually stained red or green with GFP or mCherry): https://picular.co/hn1 (see https://www.thermofisher.com/antibody/product/HN1-Antibody-P...)

[shawn]

In case anyone is wondering how this works, it does a google image search and then extracts the primary color of each result. That’s why you see unexpected colors like grey for “heart”: image search returns black and white hearts.

[starshadowx2]

My first search for "apple" gives you a bunch of greys and a red is only the 8th result. There's more grey, beige, a blue, black, yellow, orange, but only one green and 5 reds total.

Searching "heart" at least gives you a red first and majority reds.

[egfx]

that's actually a pretty terrible way of handling it. There are libraries a' plenty that achieve this without scraping google.

[tptacek]

You can type nonsense words into this --- words for which Google will say no page in its entire corpus has a match --- and get color palettes back. What's it actually doing?

[alangpierce]

Looks like Google image search always has a fallback for a nonsense search query, and the images between Google and Picular exactly match (if you hover over the bottom-right of any color card, it shows the source image):

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj

https://picular.co/sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj

If you put it in quotes, though, Google gives no results and Picular crashes (500 internal server error from an XHR):

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q="sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj...

https://picular.co/"sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj"

[dsmithatx]

Are the palettes accurate? Did you try a Google image search?

[kasey_junk]

Machine learning

[bryanrasmussen]

well I typed in config and got nothing.

[blockedTwitter]

It's also filtering for safe search. So, there are results that are assuredly indexed by Google, but the query stalls the page.

If you try linking to https://picular.co/four+letter+words

...some of those four letter words won't return results, even if they do exist. Probably because they (futurememories.se) don't want to associate their product with lewd profanity, if/when people start sharing random links on social media.

[izzydata]

Is the site getting overloaded with traffic? Nothing returns any results.

Edit: Left a search running for 10 minutes and got some colors.

[Wistar]

It appears to be flummoxed.

[heartles]

I think so, it's not returning results for me either.

[Ftuuky]

12 hours later and still doesn't work for me

[fareesh]

Hug of death I guess

[splatzone]

This is really cool, nice work!

I tried 'horse' (https://picular.co/horse) and I got some interesting results, some sky and grassy colours as well. Where do you get the photos from, and will searches give the same results every time or do they vary?

[youeseh]

I think it works. I looked for "fog in san francisco" and it gave me a bunch of shimmering gray boxes that all look the same.

[rileyteige]

https://picular.co/love returned a nice color palette

pretty neat to search for the planets as well (e.g. https://picular.co/jupiter)

I also like that the favicon changes colors. Nice touch.

[afo]

Looks similar to https://picular.co/hate

[cozzyd]

Searching for quarks or gluons did not result in colorless combinations. This website clearly doesn't conform to QCD.

[ISL]

Neither quarks nor gluons (in general) are colorless.

One should object, however, that the site returns colors for 'hadron' and 'meson' :).

[fbelzile]

Very interesting how "pride" returns the colors of the rainbow in order: https://picular.co/pride

It might be ordering the results by hue.

[DonHopkins]

Also quite vivid: https://picular.co/neon

Not so vivid: https://picular.co/noir

[lifthrasiir]

Given there is no original picture overlay in that result, it actually seems to be hardcoded.

[anonytrary]

It's funny because if you scroll through Google images fast enough, you will catch glimpse of monochromatic placeholder images for images that haven't loaded yet. The placeholder image seems to be the average color (maybe with some object boxing to reduce contributions from backgrounds and such) inside the image. This website is kind of the opposite in that it presents the placeholder color as if it were the content itself.

[jameslk]

Apparently the colors come from the images in Google Images search results.

In the bottom right of each color is a button that reveals the image where the color is sourced from.

[tom4000]

Doesn't work out of the box with tracking protection in browsers enabled. So I don't see any color and I guess I don't have to.

[suyash]

Loved the idea and well implemented. Is it open source, like to add a feature to it. Could you also care to share about the underlying algorithm ?

[teolandon]

Seems to be doing a google image search and take the average color. Meh.

EDIT: My "meh" is not bashing on the author or anything, at least they actually made a project, all I've done this past while is browse HN and make half-baked terminal apps. It was more of a let-down because I thought this was a very cool idea and was interested in a sophisticated implementation of it.

[zouhair]

I don't know why but this reminded of Guess-The-Google[0] where you get a series of images and you have to guess the search word that generate them.

Sadly, I couldn't find any playable version of it.

[0]: https://www.onlymelbourne.com.au/guess-the-google

[ape4]

Could this be implemented by doing a google image search for whatever the user enters. Then show the average color of each image.

[scrollaway]

That's exactly how it's implemented. You can hover over the pictures' corners to show the original image.

[bkohlmann]

I just tried "love" and "hate" - the first three results were very similar shades of red.

[labster]

Love and hate are pretty similar, both are passionate emotions. We just need to remember that, and then it's easy to choose the right one.

[tomcam]

Neat! No greens returned in https://picular.co/christmas but OTOH I just created palettes called Retro and Grunge for a recent project and they were quite similar to Picular’s choices

[DonHopkins]

I found some nice greens: https://picular.co/marijuana -- Have a MERRY CHRISTMAS! (There, I said it.)

[rileyteige]

https://picular.co/12+days+of+Christmas gets a couple greens

[Ekuju]

Considering this apparently uses Google images, it would probably be improved if you add "_ color" to the end of every search.

For christmas this seems to be the case.

[felideon]

Interesting. Same for "cash" or "money".

[rainbowmverse]

I put in bisexual. It returned those colors, but also returned the colors for the pansexual pride flag. https://picular.co/bisexual

I wonder what kind of magic is going on under the hood.

[irrational]

I searched blue and it returned some tan and green colors (but not bluish green or greenish blue).

I searched naked, expecting skin colors (I was wondering if it would tend to show "white" skin colors instead of a range of skin colors). The results were... strange.

[joe5150]

if you search "skin" you get more or less anticipated results. I think it's using safesearch-filtered results, so "naked" isn't likely to return any actual naked bodies.

[martyvis]

If you are really looking for colours and palettes with a theme you are much better off with the groupthink at sites like https://www.colourlovers.com/