Web Scraper Utilizes Google Street view Images to Power a University Tour

Abstract

Due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, college tours are no longer available, so many students have lost the opportunity to see their dream school’s campus. To solve this problem, we developed a product called “Virtourgo,” a university virtual tour website that uses Google Street View images gathered from a web scraper allowing students to see what college campuses are like even when tours are unavailable during the pandemic. The project consists of 3/4 parts: the web scraper script, the GitHub server, the Google Domains DNS Server, and the HTML files. Some challenges we met include scraping repeated pictures and letting the HTML dropdown menu jump to the correct location. We solved these by implementing Python and Javascript functions that specifically target such challenges. Finally, after experimenting with all the functions of the web scraper and website, we confirmed that it works as expected and can scrape and deliver tours of any university campus or public buildings we want.