Projects > Programming > DaveDaveFind
Tools & skills: Python, Bottle, Google App Engine, BeautifulSoup
I made DaveDaveFind for an end-of-class competition in Udacity’s inaugural CS101 course, which taught basic programming skills by showing students how to design and build a web crawler. DaveDaveFind used the crawler built in class as the basis for a simple search engine that indexes the Udacity course materials, forum, and lecture transcripts. It also does some cool things like deep-linking to search terms inside YouTube videos, returning results from Python documentation for Python-related search terms, and accepting commands inspired by DuckDuckGo’s !bang syntax.
The search crawler and web application were written in Python, using the Bottle web framework on Google App Engine. The crawler code uses BeautifulSoup to read HTML, Nikita the Spider to read robots.txt files, and the DuckDuckGo API to search Python documentation. Pages are styled with Twitter Bootstrap and enhanced by icons from Glyphicons.
This project was selected as a winning entry in the CS101 competition. I won a trip to Udacity headquarters in Palo Alto.