Housepets search engine!
Posted: Wed Sep 15, 2021 3:01 am
Hello Housepets fans! Today I'm starting an ambitious project to create the Housepets Search Engine™, potentially a very powerful tool for anyone who would like to study Housepets!
Let me introduce myself: I'm an editor over at the Housepets! Fandom Wiki. As you can imagine, writing about the comic requires alot of research into the different story arcs, characters, and so on. For each page that I write, I need to have a full picture of the subject in order to faithfully represent the comic. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to effectively navigate the comic to find specific comic strips or information on overarching plot points like the Cosmic Game for instance. I've had to make up for this by memorizing a lot of the comic and just being able to remember things, but I've always thought: "I wish there was a better way to search the Comic!!"
And I came up with the dream of the Housepets Search Engine™, a website like Google where you can search the Housepets comic for any comic strips you'd like: search by character appearance, search by comic title, search by publishing date, and so on.
And today I start making that dream come true! How do I do that I hear you say? I have recently gained a lot of knowledge in what's called "web scraping", which is the art of programming a bot that can go to a website and "scrape", or gather, the information inside, so that I can get huge amounts of data very fast. Basically it involves a lot of this:
Yes... it can be a headache sometimes... but web scraping is a very powerful tool indeed.
My idea for the Housepets Search Engine™ is that I start by writing a bot that goes to the Housepets comic website and goes through ALL of the comic strips, every single one, and gathers all of the information possible from each comic: the title, publishing date, which characters appear, and which story arc the strip is from (and more!), all this information can be put together in a HUGE database, and essentially this can be used as a look-up table to search the comic. It would look something like this:
With this Housepets Database, specific searches can be done. For instance, it's possible to search for every comic strip that includes two characters, in order to see how the two characters have interacted throughout the comic. If you remember part of a comic strip title, you can search by that and easily find it! And even better, I'm also planning on using a text-recognition algorithm so that I can make a transcript of the text inside the comic strips. This way, you can search the comic by what words the characters have used, expanding your ability to navigate the comic.
So yeah, very big ideas indeed! Now to actually make it though... The first step is, as mentioned, making a complete Housepets Database. This would take the shape of a table like the one in the example above. The next step would be to make a website or application that any Housepets! fan can access and search with. This is the tricky step that I'm not sure how to solve... but I'm sure there is a solution. In any case, stay tuned for the progress!
Let me introduce myself: I'm an editor over at the Housepets! Fandom Wiki. As you can imagine, writing about the comic requires alot of research into the different story arcs, characters, and so on. For each page that I write, I need to have a full picture of the subject in order to faithfully represent the comic. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to effectively navigate the comic to find specific comic strips or information on overarching plot points like the Cosmic Game for instance. I've had to make up for this by memorizing a lot of the comic and just being able to remember things, but I've always thought: "I wish there was a better way to search the Comic!!"
And I came up with the dream of the Housepets Search Engine™, a website like Google where you can search the Housepets comic for any comic strips you'd like: search by character appearance, search by comic title, search by publishing date, and so on.
And today I start making that dream come true! How do I do that I hear you say? I have recently gained a lot of knowledge in what's called "web scraping", which is the art of programming a bot that can go to a website and "scrape", or gather, the information inside, so that I can get huge amounts of data very fast. Basically it involves a lot of this:
Yes... it can be a headache sometimes... but web scraping is a very powerful tool indeed.
My idea for the Housepets Search Engine™ is that I start by writing a bot that goes to the Housepets comic website and goes through ALL of the comic strips, every single one, and gathers all of the information possible from each comic: the title, publishing date, which characters appear, and which story arc the strip is from (and more!), all this information can be put together in a HUGE database, and essentially this can be used as a look-up table to search the comic. It would look something like this:
With this Housepets Database, specific searches can be done. For instance, it's possible to search for every comic strip that includes two characters, in order to see how the two characters have interacted throughout the comic. If you remember part of a comic strip title, you can search by that and easily find it! And even better, I'm also planning on using a text-recognition algorithm so that I can make a transcript of the text inside the comic strips. This way, you can search the comic by what words the characters have used, expanding your ability to navigate the comic.
So yeah, very big ideas indeed! Now to actually make it though... The first step is, as mentioned, making a complete Housepets Database. This would take the shape of a table like the one in the example above. The next step would be to make a website or application that any Housepets! fan can access and search with. This is the tricky step that I'm not sure how to solve... but I'm sure there is a solution. In any case, stay tuned for the progress!