Checkr

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Inspiration

Our inspiration for this website was the current 2020 Presidential Election. Many news articles right now are false and spread misinformation. We wanted to create a simple way for people to verify the authenticity of the article they are reading.

What it does

Checkr takes a url from the user and scans the websites and pulls out relevant metadata. Using this data we check how old the articles are and whether they were posted by a reputable source and author. The more checks that it fails the lower its score goes indicating that the article should be taken with a grain of salt.

How we built it

We built this using Flask as our backend server and python to create the web scrapper that would pull the metadata we needed. Once we collected the information we would use HTML, CSS, and JS to display the information to the user.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge that we ran into was making the python web scrapper work on all news websites. Many websites style their websites differently so we had to make sure that our web scrapper was generalized enough to get the relevant information that we needed. Another problem that we initially faced was setting up the Flask backend and connecting it to our front end because this was the first time we had used Flask.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are most proud of making our web scrapper work on multiple websites. Although it doesn't work on every news article we made tried to make it work on big websites that many people would go to.

What I learned

We learned a lot about the web development process from front-end to the backend. We also learned how ot implement various python libraries to make our web scrapper versatile. We also learned a lot and I mean a lot about Visual Studio Code's Live Share feature cause we spent about an hour trying to get that to work ;)

What's next for Checkr

The next step for Checkr would be make the web scrapper work on more news websites. We would also want to try and implement and NLP model that could actually detect whether the article is fake or not with more accuracy than hard coded features we created. We would also want to host the application on a web server so that it is accessible to everyone.