March 2nd, 2009

Elastic times

nyt_elastic

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.