

Meet the Web Database Company Google Just Bought (Hint: Not Metaweb) - ojbyrne
http://gigaom.com/2010/07/19/meet-the-web-database-company-google-just-bought-hint-not-metaweb/

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mark_l_watson
Well, that is an interesting theory. Perhaps Google wanted both the travel
business and Needle?

I would love to know how much work it takes to build a custom Needle schema,
set it up, etc. for a new domain. Anyone tried it?

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alec
I work at ITA, but not on Needle. I have played around with an internal demo,
but not for anything serious; I found it easy to use and to require little or
no programming.

Check out the video: <http://www.needlebase.com/videos/video1>

Part of Needle is a browser interface that helps you click through a website
and tell it what to scrape without writing any code. It's pretty smart about
reducing the amount of work you have to do; that starts at 1:50 of the video.

Needle is currently in open beta; try it out for yourself!

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joubert
What happens if the web page's structure changes? Something as simple as a
table on a Wikipedia page that is over lower down the page?

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gmcdonald
Changes like that are usually fine. The tagging isn't keyed to specific DOM
paths.

glenn (Needle)

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yesbabyyes
Wow, this is something similar to my favorite weekend project for a while,
albeit that has a perspective more like <http://timetric.com/>.

Looks/sounds seriously awesome.

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jambo
The front end looks similar to Metaweb's open source Freebase Gridworks.
<http://code.google.com/p/freebase-gridworks/>

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clistctrl
Watching the tutorial video on their website, the only word that comes to mind
is "incredible" ITA really has created an amazing piece of software here.

