Making a company searcheror how two Swedes conquered the west

About us…

In common

• College freshmen• Likes

programming• From Sweden

• 19 years old• Makes electronic music

Samuel

• 18 years old• Plays the guitar

Sebastian

What have we done whilst being here?

So far, we’ve written a program in Python…

Its purpouse is to help ISSIP in the search for new members…

It does so by searching the list for the company the user want to search for, and writes to a local list...

The list contains basic information, such as current rank, and some other numbers.

The idea for it sprung from the mind of Jim Spohrer, our mentor…

We had a meeting, brainstorming about functionality and elaborating the idea.

Then we got to work…

Writing lines of codes, and trying to figure out why it wasn’t working…

After a while we decided to split the work, amplifying the effectivity…

Which it did. We figured out the problems much faster…

And almost two weeks after we started, we had a functional program.

But how does it work?

Let’s explain the program without complex words…

It starts by asking the user for a company name…

Program UserWhich company?

User input

Then it checks if the company is on the Forbes Global 2000 list…

Program Company on list? Forbes.com

Yes

If it’s a match, the program extracts the useful data…

Program Forbes.comInformation

After that, it checks the company’s wikipedia page and extracts the summary and all the links in the summary…

ProgramGive me the summary and links Wikipedia.org

Summary and links

Then, it opens all the links from the summary and extracts their summaries…

ProgramGive me the summary Wikipedia.orgGive me the summary

Give me the summary

Give me the summaryGive me the

summary

Give me the summary

Summaries

Finally it writes everything all to a local *.txt, where * is the company’s name as it is written on forbes.com.

Program *.txt computer

Here’s a complete visualization of the process.

What company do you want to search for?

User Input

Is it on the Forbes Global 2000 list?

Yes

NoExit

Check Wikipedia

Extract summary and links Open links and extract

summary

Extract information

Write to *.txt file

Exit

What about the future of the program?

The future holds a lot of bug-fixing, but also additional features…

Like adding a way for the program to read text files using Natural Language Processing to further enhance the capability…

We’re also planning features that makes it easier for people to use…

Such as adding speech-to-text and text-to-speech, and porting it to mobile devices…

But before that, we’ll add a pretty user interface, to make it easier to use…

When we’ve done all that we’ll maybe even expand it to not search only Wikipedia and Forbes, but all of the web.

The endBy Sebastian Grunditz and Samuel Håkansson