The YouTube Insult Generator pulls the best slights from the video site's comments section.
Screengrab: Wired.com

Some YouTube commenters have turned rudeness into an art form, and a new “search engine for insults” lets you easily harvest the fruits of their ludicrous invective.

Why would you want to? Oftentimes offensive, poorly punctuated and riddled with misspellings, some might argue that YouTube comments are a sign of the impending end of the human race. But they’re also pretty funny. Sometimes. And when you’re looking for the right words to hurl in a comments section, coming up with your own worthy bit of mud to sling can be tough.

Now there is help: The YouTube Insult Generator.

The simple tool, created by EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty, is a search engine that takes a term, then uses the YouTube API to find videos relevant to that term and grabs the latest 50 comments. From those 50 search results, the generator finds the ones that start with a number followed by terms such as “people,” “nincompoops” or “youtubers” (key aspects of quality comments), then replaces the number and the word “people” with the word “you.”

So far, Holovaty’s act of “poor man’s data mining,” which he said took about 45 minutes to build, only finds comments about 50 percent of the time. But some of its findings are pretty good (try “Tom Cruise,” “Michael Jackson” or even “Wired” — the results are amusing, but a little too blue to republish here).

“I’m really interested in creating order from madness, and I like keeping an eye out for structured data in odd places,” Holovaty said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Any competent programmer can build, say, blog software, or a Groupon clone, or some boring web app, but to make something truly witty, from a programming perspective, now that’s something to aspire to.”

What terms should you try if you want to take Holovaty’s YouTube Insult Generator for a spin? Pop-culture figures work well (see the Lady Gaga example above). Enjoy and, if you must, put the best insults the generator unearths in the comments below.

[via Waxy.org Links]