Giphy is a search engine for gifs, the short animated graphics that we see around the Internet. Giphy is also a creative platform where people create new gifs.

Every search engine requires the construction of a search index, which is a data structure that responds to search queries efficiently. Since Giphy is a search engine for graphics, there is almost no text inherently associated with the each document. Giphy uses a pipeline of different labeling techniques in order to make a gif indexable by the search engine.

In my conversation with Giphy CTO Anthony Johnson, we discuss how to scale a search engine, why Giphy needs to build new techniques for image processing, how human labeling for machine learning is evolving, and the future of Giphy–both as a creative medium and an advertising platform.

This was an exciting and wide-reaching interview.

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