Today was a good day, so I thought I would share its results imme­di­ately, instead of fine-tuning for­ever — who knows when I find the time anyways!

I built a lit­tle facet browser for the New York Times Arti­cle Search API - an impres­sively fast faceted search engine cov­er­ing over two mil­lion arti­cles. So, give it a spin!

Some caveats:

• Don’t look for the page nav­i­ga­tion — there is none. Pure lazi­ness, will update it soon.
• The ini­tial counts are based on a search for “the” (which I fig­ured would appear in all arti­cles). Unfor­tu­nately, only the top 15 or so val­ues per facet are returned, so you can­not click, e.g. the year 2008 in the begin­ning. Will fix.
• The API has a request limit of 5000 queries per day. So if your requests don’t work — come back tomor­row morning :)
• Unfor­tu­nately, the API seems to sup­port only one value per facet. So, all facets are single-select.(fixed, see comments).

The code is based on my totally revamped elas­tic lists pro­to­type. I used this project as a lit­tle sand­box exper­i­ment of how easy cus­tomiza­tion is pos­si­ble, and espe­cially how to make a switch from a fully client-based to a server–based fil­ter­ing model.

I just came across free­base again, and I have to say this thing looks really pros­per­ing. Free­base is sort of a meta­data / seman­tic web wiki, struc­tured around top­ics, types and domains. Essen­tially, it lets users add descrip­tions of enti­ties, such as movies, per­sons, build­ings and relate them to each other. The set of prop­er­ties used, of course, depends on the type of an entity. The project reuses a lot of Wikipedia or other free infor­ma­tion, but the inter­est­ing thing is the struc­tured approach and, for devel­op­ers, espe­cially the really pow­er­ful API with a very inter­est­ing query lan­guage approach based on JSON. Mashup time! :)

To get started, browse free­base, e.g. about, say, archi­tec­ture!

I am hav­ing fun here with a lit­tle cus­tom made Flash app that reads • hourly shots from my built-in web­cam • my twit­ter posts • and my deli­cious bookmarks

and puts it all together. Bit messy at the moment, but I am work­ing on it.

Big­ger pic­ture here.