Created by Paul Kehrer, Sean Schulte and Allie Young, the site is named after a computer built by one of the show's recurring characters, Professor Frink.

[4] Most of Frinkiac's code, written with the Go language in a week,[4] determines which screenshot frame is most pertinent to the search term by cutting each scene into 100 buckets of matching size amount.

[6] After a few weeks with Allie Young creating the user interface, the three people involved in making Frinkiac tested it with their relatives but didn't launch it for public use until February 2, 2016,[4][5] starting with almost three million screenshots from episodes of the show's first fifteen seasons.

The GIF loop time limit was also increased to seven seconds, because, as Kehrer joked: "it was derived from my desire to see Grandpa walk in circles at the burlesque house entrance".

[11] When reviewing the site upon its February 2016 launch, Hannah Hawkins writing for Junkee, supported Frinkiac's inclusion of only episodes from the first fifteen seasons, saying "there's no chance of any awful unfunny jokes appearing on your screen".