Welcome to SimpleStack.

SimpleStack is a Search Engine dedicated to solving your programming issues. It searches the web - using Stack Exchange - for suitable solutions.

SimpleStack cuts through all the redundancies, giving you only what matters, through overcoming bugs and issues by shaping the your input to yield clear and efficient search results with the aid of AI.

SimpleStack is currently in it's Beta testing stage, please give feedback here.

$ git clone https://github.com/yangman946/SimpleStack

There are two ways to access this project:

1. Visit https://simplestack.pythonanywhere.com/ on your browser.

If you wish to run SimpleStack locally:

1. Make sure python is installed and added to path

2. open command prompt

3. Clone this project to your desired location: $ git clone https://github.com/yangman946/SimpleStack or download the source code:

4. Go to the project directory containing manage.py $ cd [your desired location]/simplestack/website/simplestack

5. Get Django: $ pip install django

6. Get virtual environment: $ pip install virtualenv

7. run $ venv\Scripts\activate to activate virtual environment

8. run $ python manage.py runserver to run server

9. Visit the locally hosted site (address shown on command prompt)

see online help/help guide here

module not found error - Make sure the version of pip you are using is up to date and python is added to path

Unable to clone repository? - try downloading the repository manually as shown in step 5.

Unable to activate venv? - ensure venv is installed at the correct location: at the same folder manage.py resides in.

Unable to access the provided URL - the server may be down, wait some time or give feedback here

see trouble shooting for online help/help guide here

Although websites like Google can also find results to programming issues, most developers, mainly beginners, struggle to find relevant information.

1) SimpleStack will use the given search query to find a list of relevant results and compare each to the following criteria:

    criteria:                                   good result:
    - will sort by score: vote count            [high]          
    - is answered                               [yes]      
    - answer count                              [high]    
    - view count                                [high]          
    - count of common tags                      [high]          
    - AI relevancy                              [high]
    - detected language                         [yes]
    - detected question type                    [yes]     

2) SimpleStack will unpack all answers and output the top answer to the user. 

3) Each subsequent answer is ranked according to a score derived from the criteria above. 

4) to fetch answers, an API call is made, getting the answer as JSON

Created by Clarence Yang 2021 for the HSC SDD major project.