Inspiration
The app was inspired by the 6th degrees of Kevin Bacon game. We wanted to make a light hearted project that is easy to showcase and gives information about the 2016 us presidential election candidate.
What it does
It's a website, where you can enter a word/topic and then it will show you a link path from the Wikipedia article for the word you gave to the articles for the 2 candidates. It will also show you how many times the articles for both candidates have been viewed on Wikipedia the past 30 days. Finally it will look up all the news articles relating to the 2 candidates from the past few days, look at how many times your search term was mentioned in those articles and it reports that number as well.
How we built it
The frontend was built on top of a template. The backend was written in python and was made into a Web service using Flask. For the Wikipedia links, we scrape the Wikipedia articles for links and then run a simple greedy algorithm with a heuristic on the results to find paths. For the page views we use the eventregistry API. For the articles we also use the eventregistry API and then parse the result using beautiful soup. The backend and frontend are hosted on separate heroku nodes.
Challenges we ran intout
We originally tried to deploy both our frontend and backend on the same node, which we didn't get to work properly.
Getting the run time of our Wikipedia crawler algorithm down to reasonable speeds.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Actually managing to come up with an idea. Building a Web webcrawler from scratch!
What we learned
How to use Flask and the eventregistry API. How to build a Web crawler.
What's next for Hillary-Trump
Make our algorithms faster, add in new data to report and add support for the candidates from past elections.
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