I was trying to find all the gallery openings in the Meat Packing district tonight. (We have been invited to one, but the galleries down there tend to cluster openings to attract more patrons to all, and it would be fun to visit some others at the same time.)

So what I would like to see is a search feature that picked out events posted on web pages, then let me search amongst those events by date and/or time and my desired keywords ["gallery openings -weird"]. (Since every website uses a different convention to convey dates, it's very hard to do this manually.)

Google has a Local service that allows you to search by ZIP code, but while I always hesitate to suggest new features for commercial services, I think this is a niche they could usefully explore.
-- DrCurry, Sep 15 2005

The Meat Packing district http://www.newyorkm...ods/meatpacking.htm
"chock full of hip restaurants, exclusive clubs, and paycheck-draining boutiques." [DrC] should feel right at home. [angel, Sep 15 2005]

Google Hacks http://douweosinga....jects/googlehistory
Would this be for the teacher's version? [Scythan, Sep 16 2005]

Shhh! Someone's listening. http://google.weblo...ith-their-practice/
(Waves to Google) [Dub, Apr 26 2006]

baked, e.g. this searches for meat packing district between 8/16 and 8/20 http://www.google.c...10,cd_max:8/20/2010
You can add "&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:8/16/2010,cd_max:8/20/2010" to any search where you replace the 8/16/2010 with the starting date and the 8/20/2010 with the ending date. They have a nicer interface, but I don't see how to make it appear consistently. [James Newton, Aug 13 2010]

This is a great idea - if it were also linked to a reliable online calendar that knows what public holidays are happening where and when, I'd be purchasing stock at this very moment.
-- zen_tom, Sep 15 2005


what the devil is the meat packing area? :)
-- po, Sep 15 2005


good question, i wasn't going to mention it.
-- zen_tom, Sep 15 2005


Thanks [angel], it sounds like New York's equivalent of Smithfield(s?) Market.
-- zen_tom, Sep 15 2005


thought it was going to be a bit like Soho.

*our* calendar is much better - time for an airing.
-- po, Sep 15 2005


Add it to Google Images as well, to find pictures of a certain date and location.
-- Worldgineer, Sep 15 2005


a universal calendar would be great, although I think a subscription model, like Apple's iCal (/Sunbird) would work best.
-- neilp, Sep 15 2005


Baked.
-- Dub, Apr 24 2006


Meaning...?
-- jutta, Apr 24 2006


hmmn, perhaps [Dub] means google calendar (see link). They do imply that you can search 'public' calendars, e.g. one's you don't know about by name.
-- neilp, Apr 25 2006


[neilp] Yes, I did - I assumed everyone had heard of it by now - I thought, judging by the timing that just maybe someone at Google found the post, and created Google Calendar specifically as a response to this post!

[jutta]Oni soit qui mal y pense - I wasn't being naughty, 'onest.
-- Dub, Apr 25 2006


Good idea; I always want to find out when the 5-million people "races" are in Central Park, so I can stay the heck away from it on those days. Noisy drunk bird-scaring nature-nonappreciating bunch of wild screaming lunatics.

I currently try Googling "central park 2006 race etc." but there are apparently four thousand places in the world called Central Park, and 260000 cities named "New York" as well as 13 thousand "Manhattans" so it's useless. Bun.
-- phundug, Apr 25 2006


Google Calendar is a google-owned frontend to the independent iCal XML format, and has little or nothing to do with this idea, which is about understanding natural language clues about dates and times in human text.
-- jutta, Apr 25 2006


IIRC anyone can write a component that will plug into the calendar and do whatever they want...Which includes tying time and space together - e.g. producing a specific calendar of information about events (including opening times) specific to a given location - ...If they wanted to - Someone //just// has to write a plug in.
-- Dub, Apr 25 2006


Wikipedia tagging conventions make for a pretty comprehensive cross reference of historical events by year and by date-within-year. Perhaps a wiki is the ideal data structure for such things.

A search engine would be a more ideal tool. Date format recognition of a fairly fuzzy heuristic should occur during indexing, rather than trying to search the existing index.
-- LoriZ, Aug 13 2010


My email client recognizes -- pretty accurately -- things it thinks are dates/times, and offers to transfer them to my calendar. So fast fuzzy heuristic date format recognition is clearly practical. This idea is such a perfect combination of useful and feasible that I can't believe it's not baked by now.

[James_Newton] in your link, I think the date range is for the date of the web page. If so, it's different from this idea (see [jutta]'s Apr 25 anno).
-- mouseposture, Aug 14 2010


Place recognition is a little more fuzzy than name recognition. No ISO standards that I know of for street addresses or snailing addresses, but these are also fairly standard. I think I could cook up a 'regular expression' that matches 95% of USA snailing addresses w/o many false positives. 'Corner of X and Y streets' type formulations might get multiple hits if city is not specified, but surely the databases are already in place to find them all. Otherwise there's building names. And of course there are already spiders collecting lists of pages with apparent zip codes and other postal codes. And hopefully people are getting more lat/long literate with more nav-screen usage. I even saw lat/long given in a TV commercial. There should be enough easily decodable text in cypherspace to spider up an impressive database of ICBM-in-spacetime data points.
-- LoriZ, Aug 17 2010


Corner of X and Y or "at the Movie Theater" just cross references with geoIP, since most people use that sort of reference for their hometowns.

It gets a little iffy if you're in a major metro area with multiples of the above (Every town around Boston has a street named for every other town around Boston as near as I can tell), but most people will provide enough info to make it work.
-- MechE, Aug 17 2010



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