WordHunter

Inspiration

As people who live lives immersed in technology, we have spent quite a bit of time browsing the internet for information. Often times we end up looking for that information in news articles and tech journals. The problem is that you can wander for quite a while trying to find an article that is actually what you are looking for. That sprang into the idea to find a way to guide that process through peers. To avoid all of the unnecessary articles and get to what you want.

What it does

WordHunter is a search engine designed specifically for browsing websites that host journals and other articles. It takes in a search term and then finds synonyms for that word. From there, it takes those synonyms and compares them to all of the keywords for articles stored in its database. Those matches are then used to pull 3 articles: the most relevant, the highest reviewed, and a random article within the selection. Those articles are then displayed to choose from and read. After reading the article, the user can then give it a thumbs up or down to determine how good of an article it is.

How we built it

The app was split into 3 parts: the UI, the back end and fully setting up the database. The UI and the back end had to communicate using RESTful services, which was made easy by the use of Backbone.js, which was chosen due to the single, dynamic page that the app was going to be. Python was used on the back end to connect to the database and the front end. As for a database, MongoDB was used. It allows easy storage of large strings and went well with this project. The database was populated with information pulled from multiple websites.

Challenges we ran into

The largest challenge that we ran into came before we started our project. As we were brainstorming, this idea came up and we all liked the idea. However, none of us could think of a way to actually search all of the different sources we were looking for and then populate our own page. There was a ton of websites that could be searched, and just googling it and trying to grab that wasn't sensible. After bouncing ideas around we decided to give it a try and eventually ran into a library called Newspaper. Newspaper allowed us to choose websites and parse through their articles, picking out key words, the title and other information. That allowed us to store information into the database to use as a baseline for our application.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of how much we got done. Although we didn't quite finish everything that we wanted to, we were comfortable with where we were at the end. After spending all day Friday driving down here, we were all exhausted. We spent several hours trying to just think of a project and then all fell asleep for way longer than we should have. By the time we got truly started it felt like we had no time left. We ended up cranking out a lot of what we wanted and got to watch everything fall into place.

What I learned

I learned how to take a web app from the ground up. I've gotten to work on them before, but never actually be one of the architects behind the application. It was cool to learn that new side, and then get to host it on a domain.

What's next for WordHunter

There were several things that we never got to fully finish. The math behind the ratings isn't exactly how we would have like it to be and we are missing one of our favorite parts. The idea was to include a comment board where people could say how the article helped them and what it would be useful for. In addition to that, there is an unfathomable amount of articles out there that we haven't touched. That could be expanded upon to broaden the application as well. Finally, with the addition of that many more articles, it would be a good idea to change from 3 being displayed to full pages. They could include the rating, a little comment section, and some keywords that were hit when finding the article.

Built With

• backbone.js
• css
• handlebars.js
• html
• javascript
• jquery
• mongodb
• newspaper-api
• python
• restful-web-services