Meet the Web Database Company Google Just Bought (Hint: Not Metaweb)

gigaom.com

27 points·ojbyrne··8 comments

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?

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!

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?

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

glenn (Needle)

Thanks Alec, that was a cool video!

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.

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

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.

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