DeWitt Clinton

Yelp, my favorite local review site, launched a data API today.

I was half hoping that it would use the draft OpenSearch Geo extensions that Andrew has been working on, but after taking a look, the API is richer in scope than what the geo extension is designed for. Though as you can see below, the geo extensions could still offer a complement to the Yelp API.

Moreover, Yelp made the perfectly reasonable choice to syndicate their search results in a JSON format (example), rather than with a more bulky XML document.

Which gets me again thinking about documenting a JSON-based output format for OpenSearch results. Given OpenSearch’s agnostic relationship with syndication formats, and my own long-standing assertion that XML is merely one serialization possibility for Atom, there is nothing really stopping us from adopting JSON+OpenSearch.

In fact, here’s what an OpenSearch description document might look like for a simple (i.e., not comprehensive) Yelp search request:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>                                                                                                                                                                                      
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
                       xmlns:yelp="http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/search_api">                                                                                                                                                        
  <ShortName>Yelp Search</ShortName>                                                                                                                                                                                   
  <Description>Use Yelp.com to search local businesses.</Description>                                                                                                                                                       
  <Tags>yelp</Tags>                                                                                                                                                                                            
  <Contact>admin@example.com</Contact>                                                                                                                                                                                
  <Url type="application/json"                                                                                                                                                                                              
       template="http://api.yelp.com/business_review_search?term={searchTerms}&amp;tl_lat={yelp:tllat}&amp;tl_long={yelp:tllong}&amp;br_lat={yelp:brlat}&amp;br_long={yelp:brlong}&amp;num_biz_requested={count}&amp;ywsid={yelp:ywsid}"/>                                                                                                                                     
</OpenSearchDescription>

Or even more fun, one that tweaks the Yelp API a bit to support the OpenSearch Geo notion of bounding boxes instead of explicit corners:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>                                                                                                                                                                                      
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
                       xmlns:geo="http://a9.com/-/opensearch/extensions/geo/1.0/"
                       xmlns:yelp="http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/search_api">                                                                                                                                       
  <ShortName>Yelp Search</ShortName>                                                                                                                                                                                   
  <Description>Use Yelp.com to search local businesses.</Description>                                                                                                                                                       
  <Tags>yelp</Tags>                                                                                                                                                                                            
  <Contact>admin@example.com</Contact>                                                                                                                                                                                
  <Url type="application/json"                                                                                                                                                                                              
       template="http://api.yelp.com/business_review_search?term={searchTerms}&amp;box={geo:box}&amp;ywsid={yelp:ywsid}"/>                                                                                                                                     
</OpenSearchDescription>

Nice.

…

Somewhere out there is a complete version of a OpenSearch+Local spec I wrote for the old A9 local search engine… I wonder if anyone still has it; it might be worth digging up. Of course, that version used a payload of XHTML+microformats, which had some neat properties of its own.

In any case, the Yelp API is very cool. I hope to see some amazing apps built around an already fantastic service!

…

Update: Fixed a grammar error.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 by DeWitt Clinton and is filed under opensearch, yelp. You can bookmark this post at delicious. You can digg this post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.