Groundhog

Inspiration

Groundhog is a crowdsourced search engine. Think Reddit for Google. Every search query becomes a discussion. Others who have walked in your shoes, wondering the same things, can contribute their findings, their insights, their reactions. Specific to your search.

Results are ranked by a combination of Google’s own Page Rank and user submitted votes. In the context of a search query, each page has comments, which can be upvoted and downvoted.

PageRank is algorithmically cool. But it’s cold and impersonal. We’re adding the human factor back to it.

This began as a desire to be able to add a TL;DR to your Google search results so you can remind future-you, should you ever search the same thing, which results were valuable. Especially when looking up common errors when coding, issues, etc.

How it works

Install the Chrome extension. No login required. All comments are anonymous.

Challenges I ran into

Hacking minified obfuscated Google search JS was a nightmare.

We got 0 days of sleep.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

IT WORKS!

What I learned

Strongloop/Loopback is an amazing node.js API framework. Made backend a breeze to build.

Always think about whether or not a DOM element is loaded before $('#querying') for it.

Don't forget a function is asynchronous.

Technical debt can be toxic, even for hackathon hacks.

Fuck it, ship it.

What's next for Groundhog

Once we touch up some gaping security holes, we'll put this up on the Chrome web store!

Built With

• atlantic.net
• chrome
• express.js
• javascript
• loopback
• magic
• mongodb
• node.js
• strongloop