Toyosearch

Find your dream Toyota with our simple yet effective car browser, which allows both the average consumer and diehard car enthusiasts to find their ideal automotive.

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Inspiration

We love Toyota and we also love web development.

What it does

It aggregates many sources to present users with high quality information about Toyota cars so that they may make the best possible decision on the automobile they purchase. This ranges from basic specifications such as price, to more advanced technical aspects such as what kind of proportioning valve brake system a car has.

How we built it

The website was built in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, utilizing Node.js to gain access to the Tailwind framework and the related DaisyUI component library. This was followed by the introduction of Flask and Elasticsearch on the backend for database queries, as well as web scraping to get the data we needed for the cars.

Challenges we ran into

Getting data for the cars was difficult for us, because we found often found that online databases were missing crucial information such as price point. We attempted to scrape data from websites online many times but were denied access many times.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created something that we think reaches a standard that we weren't able to meet in previous hackathons. We believe that it's possible for people to find a use for our product in the real world. Furthermore, we showed a level of dedication to the project that we might not have had the motivation for in the past.

What we learned

We learned about grappling with the unknown, as many of us were unsure how to begin with the project, forcing us to engage with brand new concepts such as backend development and database querying. We realized that it was necessary to have realistic expectations about what we could accomplish and found that our original plans for the project were a bit unrealistic.

What's next for Toyosearch

Better information is key, and finding more efficient ways to get data will be our number one priority in a continuation of the project. The 15 second wait time before searching is particularly egregious.

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