Proposal
Writing research paper can be a frustrating and time consuming task. Nowadays, there are massive amount of information available from the internet. Unfortunately, not all the sources we found from the internet are reliable nor all the sources we found have easy access to. With the great invention of Word Hunt, not only the research time will be reduced significantly, the information researchers found from the internet will also be more reliable and more focused on the subjects; Word Hunt is the tool to make our research process a more convenient and more enjoyable one by linking synonyms to search engines.
Research is an area where a lot of students struggle, mainly with the idea of searching for information. When different words are used to search for a particular topic, the results can vary greatly. Finding the right information depends largely on using the right keywords and this can determine whether your topic is narrow or broad. Out there in the world, students can become overwhelmed by the wide array of words, but often time students struggle to find other words that mean the same thing they are searching for. The use of synonyms can greatly help students find alternative ways of expressing their work with a variety of choices.
Our group decided to develop a research tool called Word Hunt. Word Hunt is designed to help students when searching for keywords. Our tool is designed to provide synonyms of the word you entered into a search engine, thus providing the user with many keywords which helps find information more effectively. When a word is typed into Word Hunt, a webpage utilizing a word cloud opens and it provides a list of synonyms for this word. Upon clicking on one or many of these synonyms, a Google page opens up with topics relating to that word along with the word cloud from the page before. The original searched word will be prominently displayed in upper left hand corner of the word cloud. The word cloud will be minus the word that was clicked on. For example if someone types in racism, our tool will generate alternative words called synonyms such as victimization, ethnic cleansing, xenophobia, genocide, employment discrimination. Once the user clicks on one of these synonyms for example “genocide”, a Google page will open in a separate window showing information on the word genocide such as examples of genocide, genocide quotes, Darfur genocide, genocide holocaust and a definition of genocide.
Throughout the research process, we have used different research databases and search engines to find sources that we need in developing our search tool. The first source we have come across was the article “Quintura: Visual Search Keyword Tool”. Quintura is a search engine that allow users to input keywords which result in related words, similar categories, and related websites; For example, when a user type in the word “Christmas”, related keywords that pops up are Christmas tree, Christianity, school bell, recipe, stories. It also generates websites that related towards the key word “Christmas”.
The Quintura is a visual Search engine which is similar to our Word Hunt research tool in that we share a similar concept. Our research tool Word Hunt will be a better tool because our idea not only generates words but it generates a thesaurus that contains a cloud of synonyms. Instead of generating any related words, word hunt will only provide users with the most accurate and relevant results. In other words, our word hunt is more focused and organized.
Another inspiration of Word hunt comes from an article in Wikipedia. This article is about how thesaurus was created and how it works. According to Peter Roget who was the creator of the first modern thesaurus, “The main purpose of such reference works is to help the user to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed”.  A thesaurus is different from the Word hunt as well; the main purpose of our word hunt does not only focus on allowing users to “find the words (synonyms)”, it also generates a new search engine window that allow users to do further research in the words that they are interested in or related to their research topic. Unlike Thesaurus, Word hunt is the way to make research easier and fun.
Even though Thesaurus.com is not as effective as the Word hunt, it will play an important role in developing our web page. We will use the sources from Thesaurus as a reference for our word cloud. We will first look up words from Thesaurus, and then will decide which synonyms generated by thesaurus that best suited the initial search. In other words, we will first get rid of the most irrelevant results from Thesaurus; then the best results will be collected and will be used in our Word hunt database. For example, if we will use the word “happy” as our initial search. Thesaurus will provide a whole lot of synonyms to users; Some of them such as “cheerful”, “joyful”, “lively” are highly relevant, but many of these synonyms such as “gay”, “looking good”, “walking on air” are not so appropriate for the word “happy”; Therefore, these unrelated-synonyms  will be eliminated from our vocabulary library. Once again, Word hunt is the tool to make research process easier and more enjoyable.
