Home Searchable Calvin & Hobbes Archive – Check It Out Before It Disappears [UPDATED]

Searchable Calvin & Hobbes Archive – Check It Out Before It Disappears [UPDATED]

Well, this would have been helpful the last time I tried to explain Calvinball to someone.

A software engineer has created a fantastic search engine for the classic comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Head over there fast, because it may not be be around long.

Other Calvin and Hobbes search engines that reproduced the strips have been shortlyshut down in the past by cease and desist letters from Andrews McMeel Universal, which owns the rights to the strips.

The search engine’s creator, Michael Yingling, said the engine gets fewer than 20 hits per day.

But he posted a link on reddit.com yesterday, which got reposted, and reposted, and reposted, and so on – so we’re guessing traffic has gone up.

Yingling hopes that the fact that the engine is for research purposes only and he’s not turning a profit would protect him from a lawsuit. But he might try to contact Andrews McMeel Universal to discuss a compromise, he wrote on reddit.

The engine searches for exact phrases and dates out of a full archive of ten years of comics, and pops up any comics that match. Bing is Yingling’s nickname, and not a reference to Microsoft’s bing.com.

The images are from this online archive, which states the strips were “downloaded daily (starting in 1996) from ucomics.com.”

Calvin and Hobbes still has a cult following despite ceasing publication in 1995. If you’re not familiar with the comics, we suggest you click here – and be quick about it.

UPDATE: Apparently the increased traffic has been too much for the site actually hosting the images to bear, so the search engine is not returning the actual images of the strips. Furthermore, AMU has told Michael Yingling that a cease and desist letter is on the way. But Yingling says the company seems open to some sort of compromise – placing ads for the books in the search engine, for example – which would allow the site to continue.

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