Quality Content

Bringing You Content Beyond the Search

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Quality Content

a pennapps spring 2018 submission

Inspiration

Many popular sites, like Reddit, Google Search and Hacker News are essentially a list of links. It's common to click one link, read it for a bit, then go back, click another link, read it, go back, etc.

We thought it would be desirable to avoid this pattern and instead allow a user to "always go forward."

What it does

When you click on a Reddit link, Google search result, or Hacker News post, a list of related links will appear in a small box in the upper-right. The list of related links is chosen by processing the list of links from the search query / subreddit you just came from. The most related links are chosen by using natural language processing. Of course, we exclude the link you recently visited from the list of related links.

In addition, the extension responds to voice commands after hitting Enter. Saying "Google dogs" will google dogs and "Reddit Ask Reddit" will go to the /r/AskReddit subreddit. When our popup menu of links appear, you can say "first post" or "second one" to go to that related link.

How we built it

Using Google's documentation for building Chrome extensions, the API, documentation for the APIs we query, our text editors, and git. Special thanks to Cortical for their NLP API, Google Cloud Platform for Google Search, and Reddit API for their ease of use.

Challenges we ran into

For reasons outside of our control (we think), Reddit's API started giving us 503 Service Unavailable errors. Reddit servers went down for the first time in weeks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first time hacking together a chrome extension, and it was awesome to develop for Reddit, Google, and Chrome, apps we use every day. After satisfactorily completing the MVP, we were able to dive into building voice command functionality.

What we learned

  • Chrome Extensions are quite powerful.
  • There's a standard JS API for speech recognition.
  • NLP is awesome
  • The API will stop working at the least opportune time.

What's next for Quality Content

We'd like to see if we can generalize this idea to more sites. We might also want to scrape together $5 so we can put the extension on the Chrome Web Store.

Built With

  • JavaScript
  • CSS
  • Google Chrome
  • Reddit API
  • Google Search API
  • Cortica NLP API
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