Constructing Business Queries

The Datafiniti API lets you build out a wide variety of search queries so you can get the exact data you want. Queries are specified by the q parameter in the /data/businesses endpoint.

Querying a single field

The simplest query you can do is querying a single field. Here's an example:

q=city:Austin

This tells the API to search the business database for any business that has the value Austin in its city field.

You can do similar queries on any of the fields in the business schema. Here's an example that queries the name field:

q=name:mechanic

Querying multiple fields

You can run more complicated queries by combining fields with various boolean operators (e.g., AND OR). For example:

q=categories:hotels AND city:Austin

This returns any businesses that are categorized as hotels and are in the city of Austin.

You can use the OR operator to run broader queries. For example:

q=categories:hotels OR categories:restaurants

That's not all though. We can group fields and operators with parentheses to do some really fancy stuff:

q=(categories:hotels OR categories:restaurants) AND city:Austin

Querying multiple values

If you want to query multiple values within the same field, there is a simple way to do this. For example:

q=categories:(hotels OR restaurants OR bars)

This returns any businesses matching any of the above categories. This is much simpler than:

q=categories:hotels OR categories:restaurants OR categories:bars

Wildcards

You can use * to query a field for any value, like this:

q=phones:*

This will return any businesses that have an associated phone number. This is helpful if we want to make sure any businesses we get back are guaranteed to have certain fields filed out.

Wildcards can do more though. You can also append * to the value we're searching on to broaden its potential matches. For example:

q=categories:invest*

This will return businesses with any of the following in their categories field: invest, investor, investment, investing, and so on.

Querying sub-fields

Several fields in our schema have sub-fields. For example, reviews has sub-fields like date, rating, and others. Everything you can do to query fields, you can also do to query sub-fields. For example:

q=reviews.rating:3

will return all businesses that have a review with a 3-star rating.

It's important to note here that querying on sub-fields will not only return sub-objects that match your query. The entire field will be returned.

For instance, if a business look likes this:

{
  "name": "example business",
  "reviews:": [
    {
      "rating": 3
    },
    {
      "rating": 4
    }
  ]
}

then you'll see both rating values in your data, even if you do q=reviews.rating:3.

Range queries

Any fields that are dates, integers, or doubles will let you search them based on a range.

q=dateAdded:[2017-01-01 TO 2017-02-01]

will return all businesses that have been added to the database between Jan 1, 2017 and Feb 2, 2017.

You can do unbounded range queries as well, like:

q=dateAdded:[2017-01-01 TO *]

This will return all businesses have been added since Jan 1, 2017 until the current date.

You can also use comparison operators like >, >=, <=, and <. These are helpful when you want to search for products that are cheaper or more expensive than certain limits. E.g.:

q=reviews.rating:>3

returns all businesses that have reviews greater than 3..