A web-scraping project by Tinson, Wency, Shamsi, and Zaza for Hack Instead 2020.
Hack Instead 2020 was a virtual Hackathon event held on August 7-9, 2020 to engage Canadian students despite the hardships of quarantine.
The event had an open theme so teams were able to freely design their project around anything they wanted.
Our team, "SWTZ", came up with a project based on finding the best grocery deals available using web-scraping and the Google Maps API.
Our project used HTML/CSS as our frontend and Python as our backend. Shamsi and Zaza worked with the HTML/CSS and Flask, while Tinson and Wency worked with the backend Python scripts using BeautifulSoup, Google Maps API, and Selenium.
Our design was able to scrape grocery prices on four different websites (Longos, Metro, Zehrs, and NoFrills). We based our script on a user located in Guelph, ON, Canada but it is very possible to extend it to locations across Canada and internationally.
One of the limiting factors is that grocers must have their prices readily available on their website for scraping - if not, web scraping becomes useless in gathering data for certain stores.