Anime Scene Search Engine (2020)

December 31, 2020 · View on GitHub

Anime Scene Search Engine (2020)

from whatanime.ga to trace.moe
5 years up and running
by @soruly

Brief History

2015: whatanime.ga went online

2016: Web Extension, Telegram Bot

2017: whatanime.ga API, black border crop, video preview for Telegram Bot

2018: changed domain to trace.moe, new server, natural scene cutting, released sola

2019: webpage front-end rewrite, speed optimization, doubled RAM, trace.moe API update

All presentations slides: https://github.com/soruly/slides

how it started (2017)

  • 1 million pageviews
  • 5k Chrome Extension users
  • 40k monthly active users, 2k daily users
  • 8k monthly search from the Telegram Bot

how it's going (2020)

  • 9 million pageviews (GA)
  • 4 million search served by Telegram Bot
  • 2.2+ million API search served for 3rd party apps/bots
  • 9k Web Extension users (8k Chrome, 1k Firefox) (GA)
  • 100k monthly active users, 5k daily users (GA)
  • 300k monthly unique visiters, 15k daily (Cloudflare)
  • 47k daily search (26k web, 21k API) (Cloudflare)

Website: How it started (Nov 2015)

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First prototype. A magic website that turns screenshot to video

Website: How it started (Dec 2015)

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Went public with domain whatanime.ga

Website: How it started (Dec 2015)

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Add Anilist info

Website: How it's going (Dec 2020)

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Updates in 2020

(including updates in late 2019)
  • +117.42% more users, +120.66% page views YoY
  • dark mode
  • new image proxy
  • new image search algorithm (JCD)
  • removed duplicated and subbed anime
  • new hard disks, router, switch and cases
  • automatic fail-over network
  • trace.moe API update
    • search by file upload / POST / URL
    • search by image / video
    • removed quota limit

Image Descriptors Experiments (2017)

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New image search algo (JCD)

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Image Proxy

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Image Proxy: Linode => Vercel (Zeit Now) => Cloudflare Workers

Bots: Facebook

Terminated in 2016 before release

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Bots: Telegram

https://t.me/whatanimebot

Developed and maintained by soruly

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Hidden commands: mute, jc

Bots: Discord (3rd party)

Developed and maintained by Uriel

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API

  • Form POST / File upload / URL in query string
  • Image / Video support
  • Quota limit removed (No need to ask for API tokens)
[soruly@sophie ~]$ curl -s https://trace.moe/api/search?url=https://images.plurk.com/5WiD61rYPJjd54rZ84bxJ7.png | jq '.docs[0]'
{
  "from": 321.92,
  "to": 323.83,
  "anilist_id": 112609,
  "at": 323.33,
  "season": "2020-10",
  "anime": "魔女之旅",
  "filename": "[Ohys-Raws] Majo no Tabitabi - 12 END (AT-X 1280x720 x264 AAC).mp4",
  "episode": 12,
  "tokenthumb": "9w_99Sl0J78Wy66yTMNpaA",
  "similarity": 0.9758578643762691,
  "title": "魔女の旅々",
  "title_native": "魔女の旅々",
  "title_chinese": "魔女之旅",
  "title_english": "Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina",
  "title_romaji": "Majo no Tabitabi",
  "mal_id": 40571,
  "synonyms": [
    "MajoTabi",
    "마녀의 여행"
  ],
  "synonyms_chinese": [],
  "is_adult": false
}
[soruly@sophie ~]$

Data

how it started (2016)

2395 anime series 15600 hours ~8.4TB 414 Million frames indexed, 76GB in DB (ColorLayout)

how it's going (2020)

5162 anime series 29256 hours ~21TB 1.7 Billion frames indexed, 428GB in DB (ColorLayout+JCD) (0.7B;133GB for ColorLayout, 1B;294GB for JCD)

Server: how it started

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Core i7-4790 (4 Cores), 32GB RAM, 8x4TB HDD 1G LAN

Server: how it's going

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2 x E5-2696v4 (44 Cores), 512GB RAM, 3x16TB HDD, 10G LAN

New network equipments

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Left: Netgate SG-3100, Right: MIKROTIK CRS305-1G-4S+IN

Automatic fail-over network

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Several network outage in May 2020; saved one on 5 Nov

Costs

  • Monthly costs: ~$110/month
    • Power: ~$64/month
    • Network: ~$24/month
    • CDN: ~$20/month
    • Domain: ~23.14/year
Total Hardware costs: >$5000
Total Donations over 5 years: $5738.66 ($5183.44 received)

Previously Planned Works

  • badly written sourcecode ✅
  • cleaned up misplaced anime ✅
  • AniList APIv2 ✅
  • Develop a Firefox Add-on ✅
  • Wait for facebook to approve the Messenger Bot ❌
  • Develop more IM bots ❌
  • New image descriptor FCTH (chosen JCD instead) ✅
  • Upgrade to latest version of liresolr ✅
  • Re-index everything for accurate timecode ✅

Previously Planned Works

  • Buy a faster server ✅
  • Move to new domain ✅
  • Rebuild web front-end (dark mode and mobile) ✅
  • Users accounts, bookmark a scene ❌
  • Tutorials for setting up and running the system locally ✅
  • Better communication with whoever interested (e.g. blog, channel, chatroom...) 🥴
  • Increase database coverage ✅
  • Reduce duplicates in database ✅

New Planned Works

  • Test cases
  • Migrate from PHP to nodejs or something else
  • Cross reference results from ColorLayout and JCD
  • Search queue w/ priority
  • Migrate to cloud partially
  • New server

Project URLs

Official Channels

Credits

  • Dr. Mathias Lux for LIRE Project and liresolr
  • anilist.co for providing anime info via Anilist API
  • Uriel for managing the Discord Channel and Discord Bot
  • Sponsors from Patreon, GitHub and Paypal
  • fans who helped answering questions in various channels
  • friends who reported bugs and issues to me

自己紹介

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名前：soruly そ ↓ ル ↑ リ ↑ です(>_<)

年齢：１８＋ 身長：１５５ｃｍ 体重：とにかく軽い

好きな物: 日常系アニメ、音ゲー、プログラミング、甘いもの、ふわふわもの

https://about.me/soruly