Most search engines were built 20 years ago when the internet was mostly text. Since then it’s evolved to encompass everything in life: social media, video, entertainment, culture, all created by a new generation of creative people for a new audience. GIFs are a much better encoding format for everything around us; they add in time and expression into what was primarily a text based world.

GIPHY and Affectiva discussed the lack of feeling and emotion on the internet and wondered how we could bring the human element back to communication and the internet as a whole. As a result, GIPHY has built a new type of internet search engine – one that revolves around searchable content beyond text. GIPHY organizes all the world’s GIFs and makes it searchable and discoverable to everyone. Their partners, artists, users create the best GIFs with their own creation tools which then go through their process to become searchable and available everywhere.

GIPHY experimented with Affectiva’s SDK as an automatic way to tag GIFs with emotions and reactions. As a platform for online expression, Affectiva was able to help GIPHY most efficiently catalogue all the GIFs into specific sentiment.

Affectiva’s technology has aso been integrated in real time events such as the presidential elections to find the best reaction GIFs, as well as give commentary on the emotional state of each candidate.

“Affectiva has a great empathetic (obviously) staff. I would go talk to them just for the conversation. There is a lack of great people bringing life back to technology; we need fellow developers to help make it happen.” Alex Chung, Founder & CEO of Giphy

GIPHY is dedicated to bringing back emotion and expression to messaging and digital communication. GIFs are only the beginning: later this year you’ll see GIPHY exploring all the formats that can capture more of everything that makes us human.