Motivation
Industry and media often overemphasize the importance of individual environmentalism. While individualistic actions like personal waste reduction are certainly important, they pale in comparison to the impact that even moderate industrial sustainability policies would have. Pathosearch combines individual action with an industry-oriented goal by educating consumers about the companies that so frequently appear in their search bar.
What is pathosearch?
Suppose I search "how to invest in tesla stock". Pathosearch will recognize that I'm making a query about Tesla and supplement my search results with ESG (environmental, social, and governance) statistics on the company. This encourages me to make more educated decisions about my interactions with the company.
Interpreting the statistics
Lower ratings are better for ESG statistics. Controversy levels are rankings from 1-5. Due to the nature of these statistics, they are best interpreted by comparing statistics across companies. Use pathosearch often to develop a good sense of comparison across a variety of companies.
Backend
Pathosearch employs NLP techniques to extract company names from free form Google searches. We use a custom in-memory data store to cache API requests for fast response times. The data is fetched from Yahoo finance in real time.
Challenges
We were all new to Chrome extensions, so integrating our front end and back end via an extension was the most difficult part of our project.
Try it out!
Want to try pathosearch for yourself? First, clone our GitHub repo. In Chrome, navigate to "More Tools" --> "Extensions" --> toggle on "Developer Mode" --> "Load Unpacked" --> open the "extensions" subdirectory of our repository. It's as easy as clicking on the extension after making a search.
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