News Checker

Inspiration

We believed that we could help with the current global pandemic, by helping to verify facts, particularly about it. Due to the media's attitude, they will quite often overstate/exaggerate their news, particularly for attention. However, this isn't good, as people believe what they hear from the news, and if this isn't correct, then loads of people are completely mislead, and we don't want this to be the case.

What it does

Our website/chrome extension will, when a fact is entered, return the google search results for that query, and then use an algorithm to decide upon the percentage validity of that statement, and display it on the screen. It also displays the Google Search results for that query.

The Chrome Extension is currently being reviewed by Google, before it becomes available on the Web Store. However, you can have a little peek by downloading the files from the github repo: Program/1004/Extension and using Chrome Extension Developer mode to load it in locally. However, make sure to place the images in a folder called images!

How we built it

The brunt of the project is simply, a website, that uses JavaScript to send a GET request to a PHP file, which uses SerpAPI to return the Google search results for that statement. The results are then checked by the algorithm and then a percentage is calculated, of the validity of the statement.

Challenges we ran into

Never having used APIs before. This took a long time (and a lot of Google!) to work out, but it turns out it was relatively simple upon completion :) The algorithm looked easy once it was finished, but not before! The front-end dev. was mostly quite easy, aside from the Chrome Extension, which we've never even thought of doing before.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Using JavaScript (and PHP) to connect to an API

Building a usable chrome extension

Testing out Machine Learning Algorithms

Writing an algorithm to calculate a percentage

What we learned

A lot of JavaScript

How APIs work and how to use them

What Machine Learning is and how to use it (even though we didn't use it!)

How to build a chrome extension

What's next for News Checker

Hopefully find a better API (that costs less!), so the program can become widely available

Use a Machine Learning Algorithm to make the results more reliable

Built With

• api
• css
• html
• javascript
• maths
• php