Highlight Truth - False Info Detector

Logo
Highlight Claim Before Opening Extension
Searching on Highlighted True Claim
Claim Verified
Opened Extension on Highlighted False Claim
Searching on Highlighted False Claim
Claim Shown to be False

Inspiration

With recent events, we believe that it is important for people to know if the information they are viewing is true or not. This allows for a better understanding of what is going on in our world and thus makes it better for all of us. We wanted a super easy tool that anyone can use to see if the information they are reading is true or not.

What it does

Highlight Truth is a google chrome extension, when you highlight a piece of text and click on the verify information button in the extension popup it will easily tell you what the probability is that the information you are viewing is true.

How we built it

We first started off trying to figure out how we can take a text and determine its validity. We decided that we would take the given input text and make a query out of it and send it to GCP custom search. Our next step was to figure out how with the given data from the custom search we could determine the truthfulness of the text. We designed our own algorithm that takes into account a variety of factors in deciding the validity of a piece of text, based on information found online and through sample searches. After that, we created a google chrome extension that communicates to our own Herouko hosted server to determine if a highlighted piece of text in the browser is true or not.

Challenges we ran into

It took us a long time to figure out how we would verify a piece of text with our custom search data. It took us many attempts to make a workable algorithm. This was also our first time creating a google chrome extension, which greatly added to the challenge for us.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are proud that we successfully created a tool that can be easily used by anyone to determine if what they are reading is true or not. We are also proud to have learned a lot of new skills that proved useful in completing this project.

What we learned

We learned how to create a google chrome extension, we learned to use custom search API, and how to host a server on Horuko and communicate with it. The biggest lesson we learned was how difficult it was to determine if a piece of information is true or not! So hopefully our extension can help others with alleviating that problem.

What's next for Highlight Truth - False Info Detector

We want to continue refining our algorithm for verifying information, looking into using AI for our solution and improving our UI to make it more accessible for our users.