Show HN: Free Company Autocomplete API

Show HN: Free Company Autocomplete API(blog.clearbit.com)

53 points by maccman 10 years ago | 25 comments

personjerry 10 years ago |

Either there's an off-by-one error or there's a weird design decision. Typing "y c" doesn't include the "c" in the search (so it lists websites like Yahoo first) but "y co" finds Y Combinator.

phonon 10 years ago |

If you could combine this with the one https://certsimple.com/ uses, that would be awesome!

tixocloud 10 years ago |

Brilliant idea and brilliant API. Is the company API limited to companies with an online presence/social media account?

oniiru 10 years ago | |

Thanks! Not limited there, but we definitely do better with companies that have a strong web presence.

sixdimensional 10 years ago |

You have a small typo on http://clearbit.com/pricing.

"What happens if I go over my plan's alloted requests?" => "What happens if I go over my plan's allotted requests?"

Really neat service!

oneeyedpigeon 10 years ago |

I was impressed when it located the tiny company I current work for (The Day News & Media) but less impressed that it couldn't find the enormous multinational I used to work for (John Wiley & Sons). Where does it source the data from?

rjuyal 10 years ago | |

Yes, where does this data come from? Somehow I was able to find not-so-popular companies as well.

oniiru 10 years ago | | |

Glad to hear it! We are using the dozens of sources that power our other APIs. That's the special sauce. :)

bestnameever 10 years ago | | |

Maybe twitter?

oniiru 10 years ago | |

Ah, looks like we have John Wiley & Sons listed as Wiley, which seems to be how they are typically known. Aliases would be an interesting feature though!

pki 10 years ago | |

I find it ? wiley.com is in it.

baseballmerpeak 10 years ago |

How could a company be added to the database?

rectangletangle 10 years ago | |

Implementing POST /companies/ {"name": "..."} would be nice. Other than that it's a really nice endpoint.

sinzone 10 years ago |

Curious.. which tools you used for managing the backend of all these APIs? (authentication, rate limiting, etc)

harlow 10 years ago | |

Great question. We have loads of Sinatra services running on CoreOS (using Fleet and Git for deploys) http://blog.clearbit.com/servers-part-one. From there we have a contrib Gem to share middleware between the services. These middlewares handle Auth, Rate limiting, CORS, etc.

banderon 10 years ago |

I work for credibility.com (https://credibility.com/search), and we get our data from Dun & Bradstreet. Our search seems to have more results (~18MM docs).

trialstartup 10 years ago | |

Nice. Bookmarking it

jaz 10 years ago |

Does anyone know if an API exists that returns whether a company is in good standing with a secretary of state?

Checked out the Clearbit API and I didn't see that type of data in there.

maccman 10 years ago | |

We'd love to do that but unfortunately most states (Delaware) require a filing fee of at least $10 to retrieve that.

hbcondo714 10 years ago |

Do you have plans to add more fields in the response? For example, it would be nice to get the company's ticker symbol if they are publicly traded.

benologist 10 years ago |

It'd be great if it allowed domains and hyperlinks as a search filter.

b2bguy 10 years ago | |

If you need that feature, and are willing to pay, check out the Demandbase API. I can't find any public websites documenting their API, but this Ruby gem gives an overview: https://github.com/leereilly/demandbase.

oniiru 10 years ago | |

Andrew from Clearbit here. You can definitely search by domain using our Company API (http://clearbit.com/docs#company-api). Is that what you are looking for?

mrdustinwhittle 10 years ago |

I have been using clearbit the last few months and it really is a great service with the best api docs and versioning I have seen to date (a la stripe). We use clearbit for company, persona, compliance, and prospect data.

Checkout https://svbtle.com/signup for a great experience built on clearbit. @maccman + team is killing it.

Clearbit is more narrowly focused on business apis, but in my experience Clearbit does a better job with company/persona data globally than orb intelligence, everstring, relateiq, madisonlogic.

Feature request: Better api key management to easy manage multiple environments (upgrading api versions between dev/prod)

oniiru 10 years ago | |

Thanks for the kind words Dustin! Glad to hear you are crushing it. :)

Improved API Key management is on the roadmap!