Goose - Article Extractor

Intro

Goose was originally an article extractor written in Java that has most recently (aug2011) converted to a scala project. It's mission is to take any news article or article type web page and not only extract what is the main body of the article but also all meta data and most probable image candidate.

The extraction goal is to try and get the purest extraction from the beginning of the article for servicing flipboard/pulse type applications that need to show the first snippet of a web article along with an image.

Goose will try to extract the following information:

• Main text of an article
• Main image of article
• Any Youtube/Vimeo movies embedded in article
• Meta Description
• Meta tags
• Publish Date

The wiki has the full details on how to use Goose https://github.com/jiminoc/goose/wiki

Goose was open sourced by Gravity.com in 2011

Lead Programmer: Jim Plush (Gravity.com)

Contributers: Robbie Coleman (Gravity.com)

Try it out online! http://jimplush.com/blog/goose

Licensing

If you find Goose useful or have issues please drop me a line, I'd love to hear how you're using it or what features should be improved

Goose is licensed by Gravity.com under the Apache 2.0 license, see the LICENSE file for more details

Take it for a spin

To use goose from the command line:

normalcd into the goose directory
mvn compile
MAVEN_OPTS="-Xms256m -Xmx2000m"; mvn exec:java -Dexec.mainClass=com.gravity.goose.TalkToMeGoose -Dexec.args="http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/13/native-apps-or-web-apps-particle-code-wants-you-to-do-both/" -e -q > ~/Desktop/gooseresult.txt
normal

Regarding the port from JAVA to Scala

Here are some of the reasons for the port to Scala:

• Gravity has moved more towards Scala development internally so maintenance started to become an issue
• There wasn't enough contribution to warrant keeping it in Java
• The packages were all namespaced under a person's name and not the company's name
• Scala is more fun

Issues

It was a pretty fast Java to Scala port so lots of the nicities of the Scala language aren't in the codebase yet, but those will come over the coming months as we re-write alot of the internal methods to be more Scalesque. We made sure it was still nice and operable from Java as well so if you're using goose from java you still should be able to use it with a few changes to the method signatures.