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Expanded Query Capabilities and Accelerated Data Delivery Comes to Business Data

over 7 years ago by Shion Deysarkar

June 15, 2017

In February, we announced some dramatic changes to our Product Data. We're excited to announce that those same changes have now come to our Business Data. You can read our main announcement here.

For more technical details, we've published release notes to help customers understand the technical aspects of the changes.

We've also published new guides and API docs for Product Data. You can view those at:

Both of these links go to reference material that is a work in progress.

Changes that will break existing integrations

  • You must now specify a format with your API call. format can be set to JSON or CSV. If you don’t supply a format, the API response will default to JSON.
  • Some field names have changed in order to abide by a consistent naming convention. See the last note under Data Quality below. You can view the updated product schema here.
  • The presentation and ordering of data in API responses or downloads may be different due to removal of fields or changes in field names. Some fields have been "demoted" to our features field.

Expanded Query Capabilities

All fields are searchable

  • Users can now query all fields. Previously, certain fields were could not be queried.

Query on nested fields

  • You can now query on fields within multi-valued fields, except for the reviews.text nested field. E.g., q=reviews.rating:5 will return all products with at least one review that has a 5-star rating.

Easier querying on sourceURLs

  • Previously, querying on the sourceURLs field required running a time-intensive wildcard search or knowing the exact http format of the sourceURL. Now, users can just do a query like q=sourceURLs:amazon or q=sourceURLs:shop.lego, and all relevant products will return.

Use comparison operators

  • You can now do a query like q=reviews.rating:>1 to return all businesses with a review greater than 1. >, >=, <, and <= are supported. These should only be used on fields that only contain numeric values.

Better Performance

  • Inserting raw web crawl data into the database now happens 50x faster than before.
  • Downloading full data sets can typically be done in minutes. For context, our entire business database can now be downloaded in less than 3 hours.
  • Overall improvement in stability and reliability of our back-end.

Data Quality

Implemented new merging algorithm to reduce duplicate data

  • We have implemented a more consistent approach to merging, that should lead to less duplicates and over merged records (e.g., one record for an entire mall).

More rigorous validation and normalization before database insertion

  • Raw data from web crawls will now pass through a comprehensive suite of validation checks before being accepted into the database.
  • Validation checks will also normalize values where needed to produce more standardized values.

Cleanup of existing data

  • While migrating data from our old database into ElasticSearch, we applied our validation checks and normalization methods to cleanup historical data. As a result, data is completely standardized throughout the database.
  • Included in this cleanup is a full standardization of date strings that appear in the data.

Support for foreign characters

  • Foreign characters will no longer be encoded.

Record counts are consistent

  • Previously, quick successive API calls could result in dramatically different estimated_total values, which was confusing. Our new backend shows the same estimated total value each time for the same API call (barring any additions to the database).

Standardized naming convention for all fields

  • All fields are now pascal-cased. E.g., dateSeen, `facebookPageURL'. All multi-valued fields now use a plural word. E.g., reviews, features.

Better Usability

New CSV format

  • We’ve introduced a new CSV format that splits out all values for multi-valued fields into their own rows. This should make the reading of and analysis of these fields much easier when using tools like Excel, R, and Pandas. The legacy CSV format is still available (it’s called….).

More detailed and useful error messages

  • The API now returns more useful error messages when you do something wrong or unexpected. Hopefully, these error messages act as a guidance for users when correcting their API calls.