
Google, but for colors - dcschelt
https://picular.co/
======
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](https://picular.co/zo1) (see
[https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1399&bi...](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1399&bih=908&ei=0_WGW7mIOaff0gKI6KGgDw&q=zo1&oq=zo1&gs_l=img.3..0l10.812.1160.0.1384.3.3.0.0.0.0.70.195.3.3.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..0.3.194....0.IWkvy0stiWA))

hN1 (a protein usually stained red or green with GFP or mCherry):
[https://picular.co/hn1](https://picular.co/hn1) (see
[https://www.thermofisher.com/antibody/product/HN1-Antibody-P...](https://www.thermofisher.com/antibody/product/HN1-Antibody-
Polyclonal/PA5-63771))

------
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.

~~~
RobertRoberts
Try "apples instead", all red and a single lime green.

It's amusing having a background in software development and this is the first
thought I had. (like many here I am sure would) I don't know exactly "why"
this works, but knowing that it likely would before trying. (like hitting
refresh when your web app barfs)

Someone else suggested cause of the apple logo... and it seems they are likely
right. :)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=apple&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=apple&tbm=isch)

Shows the "holes" in this method.

~~~
tyingq
Yep. Works pretty well for terms that return highly relevant images. Try "baby
poop", for example.

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

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

[https://picular.co/"sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj"](https://picular.co/"sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj")

~~~
hesselbom
Fixed! There's now a color palette for "sdlkfjsldkfjsldfkj" ;)

~~~
nickelcitymario
What did you change?

My guess is you're still doing a Google Image search, but when it returns no
results, you return something random and cache this query for consistency. Is
that about right?.

~~~
hesselbom
Good guess! That's almost right, but there's no cache involved. Random colors
based on a seed.

------
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.

------
splatzone
This is really cool, nice work!

I tried 'horse' ([https://picular.co/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](https://picular.co/love) returned a nice color
palette

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

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

~~~
afo
Looks similar to [https://picular.co/hate](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](https://picular.co/pride)

It might be ordering the results by hue.

~~~
DonHopkins
Also quite vivid: [https://picular.co/neon](https://picular.co/neon)

Not so vivid: [https://picular.co/noir](https://picular.co/noir)

~~~
jee1shi
Some nice colours as well:
[https://picular.co/pastel](https://picular.co/pastel)

------
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.

~~~
suyash
Ahh much simpler than I thought (fancy NLP and such :)

------
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](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](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

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

~~~
advisedwang
dollar does get green, perhaps it's just not US-centric?

------
rainbowmverse
I put in bisexual. It returned those colors, but also returned the colors for
the pansexual pride flag.
[https://picular.co/bisexual](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/](https://www.colourlovers.com/)

------
noelwelsh
That the icon changes color is a nice touch. I can see this being useful in
generative art.

------
yeukhon
Works.

[https://picular.co/oscarhealth](https://picular.co/oscarhealth)
[https://picular.co/yeukhon](https://picular.co/yeukhon)

------
fosco
I really like this! Searching for 'sea foam green' gave me exactly what I
thought.

That being said, personally, I would prefer something original instead of
"Google, but for colors.". just my two cents.

------
avighnay
A very good example how engaging and useful a simple idea can be! Now the
source images are also shown in the results!

I do not think it uses any AI/ML, the beauty is in the simplicity of the
solution. Awesome!

------
crobertsbmw
Not loading anything for me.

~~~
divanvisagie
I was super slow for me. Wonder what is going on in the background?

------
sonnyblarney
Would be nice instead of just colours it gets a selection of palettes.

~~~
spiralx
You can try the one of these sites for that:

[https://www.colourlovers.com/palettes/search?query=love](https://www.colourlovers.com/palettes/search?query=love)

[http://www.color-hex.com/color-palettes/?keyword=love](http://www.color-
hex.com/color-palettes/?keyword=love)

There are some other sites that do similar searches as well, just can't
remember them off the top of my head :)

------
Invictus0
Doesn't work for me: the boxes never load. I searched for potato.

------
daltonlp
[http://www.colr.org/](http://www.colr.org/) does something very similar.

------
reificator
[https://picular.co/the+matrix](https://picular.co/the+matrix) gives the
expected greens, but not as the first result sadly.

------
unfunco
Nice. I tried Formula 1 constructors, and all those that I tried matched their
liveries. Force India returned some pinks, Ferrari returned some reds, and
McLaren some orange.

------
haberdasher
[https://picular.co/devastating+public+breakup](https://picular.co/devastating+public+breakup)

------
nyrulez
No offense, but I expected more orange:
[https://picular.co/trump](https://picular.co/trump)

------
Retroity
I love this! It's really fun, and will be really useful for when I'm making
something and can't find a specific color.

------
dbomhof
Brilliant and colorful idea! Really love this!

------
asafira
It seems to me like when I type in company names, I don't get the exact colors
they use in their branding...

------
miguelmota
I put in "macbook" and it didn't return gray or black. Think the machine
learning needs some tweaking

------
test6554
I typed fall colors and got a bunch of shades of orange, tans, yellows and
browns. One blue tile in there as well...

------
21
It seems to return blue for pretty much anything ("cat", "man"), maybe because
of blue sky?

------
logfromblammo
I tried searching for "picular.co", and to my disappointment it did not melt
down the website.

------
keithnz
well, I just tried
[https://picular.co/hackernews](https://picular.co/hackernews) which gives
lots of orange, but doesn't seem to give me the color I get when I use a color
picker on the top bar of FD6423

------
deathcow
Keeps showing Broken Website Gray now

------
beardyw
I want to take all the main colours in my house and get a word back! Someone
work on it now.

~~~
divanvisagie
MVP:

return "beardyw's house"

------
2_listerine_pls
Any idea on how they obtain the underlying images? It seems like a huge pre-
trained database.

------
edgarvaldes
Interesting to see #0432CA for "human", and #3CA4D4 for "person".

------
cjohansson
Crashes half of the time, I guess it did not scale enough to handle Hacker
News

------
enriquto
Looking for "orca" I was expecting black and white, but got only blue.

------
DonHopkins
I typed in "Trump News" and I got a bunch of Fake Colors, none of which were
anything like the correct shade of orange. They're shadow banning orange
colors and right wing red colors, only showing dark left wing blue shades!!!
Why are they censoring all the warm positive Trump colors??? All colors
matter!!!

------
PokemonNoGo
Is your backend doing a google search? Wont you get blocked...

------
V-2
Nice Easter egg (I assume) for "chess" ;)

------
spazzpp2
It cannot do "lego"

But maybe it's just hug of death..

~~~
spazzpp2
okay. "lego" looks like "google"

------
J5892
I like how the first result for black is #040404.

------
lucasmullens
Cool! Reminds me of xkcd's color survey results:
[https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/](https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/)

------
rawoke083600
Anyone typed in penis yet ?

------
imkevinxu
This is SUPER DUPER cool!

------
jen729w
I'm making sounds in my throat like I'm a cat.

------
stevewilhelm
queries: ennui, glee, barack obama, donald trump, puppies, kittens, paris,
kolkata, yosemite, death valley

the machine has lots to learn.

