Super Searcher

Inspiration

We were inspired by the continued push for social good by Proviti. We wanted to find a way to innovate the tech side of improving social and community related issues while keeping the solutions effective and accessible so it could make a difference. Along with some personal experiences of struggling with education, these formed Super Searcher.

What It Does

Super Searcher enhances the casual research experience by allowing the user to enter their search query in a GUI which acts as a middle man between the user and search engines. Super Searcher takes the user query and searches it in the selected search engine, opening a user specified number of results in separate tabs for quick and easy researching. On top of this, Super Searcher logs your activity so you can always look back at what you've struggled with (logging can always be disabled).

How We Built It

Utilizing libraries PyQt5 and Selenium, we split our workload between a front-end developer and back-end developer in order not to sell the user-experience short. We built the GUI using a tool that creates .ui files, and then compiled it using PyQt5's UIC (user interface compiler) into PyQt5 python code. Selenium helped formed the whole back-end of the project which finds the links and opens the browser tabs. The CSV and some native libraries in python is what we use to store the history and information on the user's local machine. The Python code developed by both Front and Back-end developers interact with default and user-defined settings in order to execute the searches while keeping functionality.

What We Learned

This has been the first Hackathon event for most of our group, so we had the opportunity to learn a ton from the experience. We learned how to efficiently work together as the hackathon pushed us with the time limits, and most importantly how to have fun while doing so. Our connections with each other got stronger as the hours counted down and we were very confident in our final project. On top of all of that, we learned that making a difference is as easy as attempting to, that if you put your mind to it you can make a change.

What's next for Super Searcher

On a larger scale, we believe that Super Searcher has the capability of working with larger, data-science focused companies to create a map of data based on consensual provided history. We look forward to collaborating with these companies in order to better the education system in our country. The goal is to track how many times one anonymous user keeps looking for the same topic time and time again and look for the same pattern among other users within the same region. This data can be provided to these regions to notify them on what subjects (i.e Factoring in Algebra or Lewis Structures in Chemistry) need more focus.

For now though, Super Searcher will continue to support more and more features, such as filtering results by user-specified domain names.