Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Covering around four million US companies, ZoomInfo has broader coverage and is less tech-
centric than CrunchBase. It ofers a REST interface with XML output, with only 2,000 queries
a day permitted, and
terms of service
that require branding on any services you create using it:
curl "http://api.zoominfo.com/PartnerAPI/XmlOutput.aspx?\
query_type=company_search_query&pc=<key>&companyName=Facebook"
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
...
<TotalResults>84</TotalResults><CompanySearchResults>
<CompanyRecord><CompanyID>32394811</CompanyID>
<ZoomCompanyUrl>http://www.zoominfo.com/Search/CompanyDetail.aspx?
CompanyID=32394811&cs=QEB7k47oc&pc=publicapi
</ZoomCompanyUrl>
<CompanyName>Facebook</CompanyName>
<CompanyTicker/>
<Website>www.facebook.com</Website>
<CompanyAddress><City>Palo Alto</City><State>CA</State><CountryCode>USA</CountryCode>
With the most comprehensive database of company information, the Hoover's API is heavily
geared toward enterprise-level users. Hoover's does ofer a REST/JSON interface, somewhat
strangely using HTTP Basic Authentication headers for the key information. You only get three
months of free access to the API (for testing purposes) before you have to talk to the sales staf
about your application, but at least you can sign up initially online with no wait. To get informa-
tion about a company, do a search to retrieve the company ID within the service. Then you can
pull down address, revenue, and employee count, along with lots of other statistics.
For many years, Yahoo! has let you look up trading information for companies based on their
stock tickers. This isn't an oicial API, so it may be removed or altered at any point, and the
terms under which you can use the information are unclear. I'm including it despite those warn-
ings, because it does make some unique information available. Unusually, it returns its results as
a CSV ile, which is great if you want to run it through further spreadsheet processing, but which
will require a little parsing work from a scripting language:
curl "http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?\
s=BBDB.TO+NT.TO+GE+MSFT&f=snl1d1t1ohgdr"
"BBD-B.TO","BOMBARDIER INC., ",5.26,"1/7/2011","4:40pm",5.40,5.41,5.24,0.10,15.91
