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.