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This is really cool, nice work!

I tried '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?

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

Ahh much simpler than I thought (fancy NLP and such :)
Neat! No greens returned in 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
Interesting. Same for "cash" or "money".
dollar does get green, perhaps it's just not US-centric?
Considering this apparently uses Google images, it would probably be improved if you add "_ color" to the end of every search.

For christmas this seems to be the case.

Brilliant and colorful idea! Really love this!
I'm making sounds in my throat like I'm a cat.
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.
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.

Right. If you do a google image search for apple, it'll show mostly grays because it's returning the Apple logo.
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

Shows the "holes" in this method.

Yep. Works pretty well for terms that return highly relevant images. Try "baby poop", for example.
my search for apple in google returns only results somehow related to apple the company, so it would seem this is google, but for colors.
that's actually a pretty terrible way of handling it. There are libraries a' plenty that achieve this without scraping google.
that achieve what, exactly?
figuring out which colors to display based off a reference color.
but you're not giving it a reference color. you're starting with a word like "envy."
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.
That the icon changes color is a nice touch. I can see this being useful in generative art.
Is the site getting overloaded with traffic? Nothing returns any results.

Edit: Left a search running for 10 minutes and got some colors.

I think so, it's not returning results for me either.
It appears to be flummoxed.
12 hours later and still doesn't work for me
Doesn't work for me: the boxes never load. I searched for potato.
Not loading anything for me.
I was super slow for me. Wonder what is going on in the background?
Keeps showing Broken Website Gray now
Could this be implemented by doing a google image search for whatever the user enters. Then show the average color of each image.
That's exactly how it's implemented. You can hover over the pictures' corners to show the original image.
I think he means averaging over the extracted colors
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.
Searching for quarks or gluons did not result in colorless combinations. This website clearly doesn't conform to QCD.
Neither quarks nor gluons (in general) are colorless.

One should object, however, that the site returns colors for 'hadron' and 'meson' :).

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

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.