Social Coupons

Description:

The project aims to build an aggregator for collective buying sites (e.g. groupon) and indexing the offered deals to allow users to search (with multi words query) for deals from multiple platforms.
Users are authenticated in order to save their previous search queries, based on the queries we are able to advice (recommend) to user interesting deals by using the words in his last queries as entry for search engine index. 

The additional feature is the support of social activites to enhance user experience by allowing him/her to share a coupon (deal offer) with his contacts (e.g. Twitter), also to ask his contacts opinion regarding a coupon. Or even, been notified if one of his contacts took the same coupon as he/she get in a search result.

Implementation:

The Project is implemented as a web application with Python 2.7 on Google App Engine. For the client interface is implemented using jQuery mobile to provide access via smartphones. We used different libraries urllib2, urllib, httplib, json, webapp2, and other libraries from GAE (e.g. google account service for authenticating users). Social interaction still working on it for the moment.

Following figure shows search result interface:

At the footer, there is three buttons:

• Search: for entering deals search query
• Navigate: the app will provide navogation (deals category -> corresponding deals) ability by displaying exisint categories of deals then, corresponding deals
• Advice: work only if user had already submitted search queries, because it will use his search history to find new matching deals

Demo:

To run the project, you need first to launch GAE then add the project and launch it through GAE interface. Then you need to fill the database, so go to project directory and launch CrawlerClient.py that will crawl a web site (www.groupon.fr), as the crawled site is a french one you need to enter french words in your query (translation in the roadmap).

Code:

Project code can be fine at github SocialCoupons All material is released under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA license.