NYTimes Announces Open Article Search API

Yesterday, the New York Times blog announced the initial release of the New York Times Article Search API [nytimes.com]. This makes it possible to explore the first occurrence of the term “data visualization”, or identify articles that appeared on the front page and mentioned “blog”. The New York Times now has several APIs available, including (searchable) articles, best sellers (books), campaign finance, community (comments), congress (vote data), movie reviews and dictionaries (will there be a infographic / “interactive media” category, or is this already part of “articles”?).

The Article Search API is meant to make way to find, discover, explore, have fun and build new “things” based on the rich content available on the New York Times. The database contains over 2.8 million articles from 1981 until today (updated hourly). Each article comprises about 35 searchable metadata fields, from title and byline to thumbnail image and geographic region. A few applications seem already to exist, such as some I did not know before like Who’s on First. Surely more will follow?

See also the New York Times Visualization Lab.

More information at the forthcoming Times Open event. Any attendee wants to guest blog the experience?