NoData

Data is expensive. What if there was a way to search without data?

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Inspiration

Have you ever wanted to search something, but aren't connected to the internet? Data plans too expensive, but you really need to figure something out online quick? Us too, and that's why we created an application that allows you to search the internet without being connected.

What it does

Text your search queries to (705) 710-3709, and the application will text back the results of your query.

Not happy with the first result? Specify a result using the --result [number] flag.

Want to save the URL to view your result when you are connected to the internet? Send your query with --url to get the url of your result.

Send --help to see a list of all the commands.

How we built it

Built on a Nodejs backend, we leverage Twilio to send and receive text messages. When receiving a text message, we send this information using RapidAPI's Bing Search API.

Our backend is dockerized and deployed continuously using GitHub Actions onto a Google Cloud Run server. Additionally, we make use of Google Cloud's Secret Manager to not expose our API Keys to the public.

Internally, we use a domain registered with domain.com to point our text messages to our server.

Challenges we ran into

Our team is very inexperienced with Google Cloud, Docker and GitHub Actions so it was a challenge needing to deploy our app to the internet. We recognized that without deploying, we would could not allow anybody to demo our application.

  • There was a lot of configuration with permissions, and service accounts that had a learning curve. Accessing our secrets from our backend, and ensuring that the backend is authenticated to access the secrets was a huge challenge.

We also have varying levels of skill with JavaScript. It was a challenge trying to understand each other's code and collaborating efficiently to get this done.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We honestly think that this is a really cool application. It's very practical, and we can't find any solutions like this that exist right now. There was not a moment where we dreaded working on this project.

This is the most well planned project that we've all made for a hackathon. We were always aware how our individual tasks contribute to the to project as a whole. When we felt that we were making an important part of the code, we would pair program together which accelerated our understanding.

Continuously deploying is awesome! Not having to click buttons to deploy our app was really cool, and it really made our testing in production a lot easier. It also reduced a lot of potential user errors when deploying.

What we learned

Planning is very important in the early stages of a project. We could not have collaborated so well together, and separated the modules that we were coding the way we did without planning.

Hackathons are much more enjoyable when you get a full night sleep :D.

What's next for NoData

In the future, we would love to use AI to better suit the search results of the client. Some search results have a very large scope right now.

We would also like to have more time to write some tests and have better error handling.

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