honestly.

Visualize what the internet is thinking.

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Inspiration

In the age of social media, it is almost impossible to share your opinions online while staying completely anonymous. We become liars through peer pressure. With Honestly, you can share your stance on any topic and influence the way people view that topic.

What it does

Honestly takes user input and searches the internet for related articles and websites. It then intelligently finds relevant text from those websites and creates a word cloud based on the frequency of keywords. Users can also contribute their own words to this word cloud to influence how the word cloud appears to future users. Over time, the word clouds for each keyword would represent the true overall opinions of everybody.

How we built it

We created the website with express.js and ejs. The website is hosted on Heroku with a MongoDB database. We used Google's API to retrieve related websites, then used BeautifulSoup to parse through each website to get text, then used NLTK to intelligently pick out relevant keywords. User contributions stored in our MongoDB database are added to the list of relevant keywords. Lastly, we used AM4Core to construct the word cloud to show to the user.

What's next for honestly.

Ideally, we would like this to reach a large user base. The more users, the more representative our word clouds will be. We believe people will be attracted to the idea of contributing to a visualization of how the internet thinks.

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