Show HN: Semantic search engine for Studio Ghibli movie

Posted by aninibread 3 days ago

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Hi HN! I built Ghibli Search, a semantic search engine for Studio Ghibli movie scenes (e.g. Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl's Moving Castle, etc.).

Describe a dreamscape like "flying through clouds at sunset" or upload an image, and it finds visually similar scenes from the films.

Live demo: https://ghibli-search.anini.workers.dev/

Full Cloudflare stack: Workers, AI Search, R2, Workers AI

Open source: https://github.com/aninibread/ghibli-search

Would love feedback on the search quality and any ideas for improvements!

Comments

Comment by buildsjets 2 days ago

It's interesting that searches for general concepts (Countryside wildflowers, airplane scenes, train scenes) seem to work pretty well, while searches for specific characters (Ponyo, Yubaba, Porco Rosso) return negligible results.

Comment by aninibread 1 day ago

That's great feedback. The way it works right now is that I use Cloudflare AI Search to convert my image to text and embed the images. https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-search/concepts/how-ai-...

Most of the descriptions generated for the images are likely generic and doesn't contain reference to the actual characters and names. I might explore incorporating some sort of more movie specific description in the metadata of the image to improve queries for specific characters.

Comment by drivebyhooting 2 days ago

“Malevolent spirits waiting at the bottom of a pit”

Didn’t return what I expected: the scene from spirited away when chihiro and haku fall through the trap door.

Relevance can be improved with multiple ranking steps.

Comment by aninibread 1 day ago

Curious why specifically add multiple ranking steps to improve relevance? How would each ranking step differ ? Would you use different ranking models?

Comment by mi_lk 2 days ago

curious: can anyone use Ghibli's movie scenes on a random website just like that?

Comment by observationist 2 days ago

The site doesn't stream the movies, references still frames and the original works, and links directly back to the official site - there's no exploitation or arbitrage taking anything away from the studio.

Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. (2003) and Perfect 10 v. Amazon (2007) are precedents for image search engines displaying thumbnails - they were found to be fair use. The function is transformative, the site is for a completely different use case than watching media, and doesn't harm the market.

If they've purchased the movies legitimately, and have the receipts, they have an incredibly strong fair use case. Because it's beneficial to Studio Ghibli, I'd say they are best served by allowing it and not trying to exploit DMCA mechanisms to get them taken down.

This is one of those areas where copyright holders can be assholes and abuse the system for petty wins, but the big tech companies have fought and won explicit precedent demonstrating the legitimacy of fair use cases for tools exactly like this.

Awesome tool!

Comment by autoexec 2 days ago

> If they've purchased the movies legitimately, and have the receipts, they have an incredibly strong fair use case.

While I'd also argue that this could be covered under a fair use defense, I thought it worth pointing out that buying a copy of a work and having receipts would have no bearing on the right to distribute copies of that work to others.

Obviously, if someone pirated these movies they could get in trouble for that as well, but that'd be an entirely different matter from the use of copyrighted images on their website.

Comment by observationist 2 days ago

Well, if you're distributing a piece of media, you need to have legal access to the piece that you distribute. You can take a 5 second clip of a movie that hasn't been released to Netflix yet, broadcast it on X or YouTube, meet all the requisites of fair use, and it's not legal speech; you had no legal access to the media you're redistributing. The speech itself is criminal violation of copyright, because of the lack of legal rights to the media in the first place, secondary to any piracy concerns.

If Studio Ghibli were to take them to court, they'd have to show that they had legal access to the media they're redistributing, namely the frames from the various movies. I believe that in this case they're using frames directly from the official Ghibli site, so there's no ambiguity, but if they purchased each and every movie they index, they'd have an extraordinarily strong case for fair use even without linking back to the studio site.

Comment by nektro 2 days ago

@dang this domain should probably be expanded from showing just workers.dev

Comment by huflungdung 2 days ago

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