May 2008

New York Times is developing an API

This may be old news, but it looks like the New York Times is developing an API for accessing their content:

The goal, according to Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news, is to “make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data.”

Once the API is complete, the Times’ internal developers will use it to build platforms to organize all the structured data such as events listings, restaurants reviews, recipes, etc. They will offer a key to programmers, developers and others who are interested in mashing-up various data sets on the site. “The plan is definitely to open [the code] up,” Frons said. “How far we don’t know.”

Pilhofer and Frons both declined to give any specific dates, but Pilhofer said the API itself will be done “within a matter of weeks.” In the next six months, “we’ll have some of the major pieces — a restaurant guide, weekend events listings and books,” Frons added.

(Link by way of the IdeaLab Blog.)

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Articles on the future of search

John Battelle (John Battelle’s Searchblog) and Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land) are writing a series of posts on The Future of Search. From the first post:

What I find interesting are entirely new approaches to the interface of search. What happens when search is no longer driven by the command line and the blinking cursor? What happens when, for example, your query is informed by where you happen to be, or who you happen to be, or what you happen to be doing at the time of the request? To explore these ideas, it’s best to step outside the current box of a web browser on your PC, and think about mobility.

As Battelle says in his announcement the themes will look familiar to folks who’ve been following search for a while, but it should be an interesting series regardless.

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