FAQs - Company Search API

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Can I use the Company Search API to enrich data?

The Company Search API ignores the matching logic in our Company Enrichment API. We don't do any preprocessing (cleaning) of the inputs to the Company Search API, so you're almost guaranteed to have a lower match rate.

What's more, Company Search API queries and Company Enrichment API queries are structured differently. When you make a Company Enrichment API request, we have a custom-built query that takes the different input parameters and weights them differently, only returning a match in certain cases while using stack ranking in cases where there are multiple matches.

Should I use SQL or Elasticsearch for the Company Search API?

Use Elasticsearch when:

1. You have complicated boolean queries.
2. You want to maximize the control that you have over text-based matching (titles, summaries and so forth.)
3. You are comfortable writing Elasticsearch queries.

Use SQL when:

1. You are running simple searches with only a few parameters.
2. You're exclusively using ENUM parameters from our data (location, industry, etc.)
3. You are comfortable writing SQL queries.

Can I use wildcards in my search query?

Yes, wildcard terms are supported. However, we have a hard limit of 20 wildcards per query. See the relevant sections for more information about the limitations in Elasticsearch and SQL search queries.

Why is there a 1MB limit on the API requests and the response body?

The error message that you are receiving has occurred because the query is too large and cURL can't handle the response. Calling the API with Python should alleviate this issue as Python compresses the extra space within an Elasticsearch query. Additional ways to decrease the query size are to reduce the profile count parameter from 100 to 60 for each call and to remove the pretty tag. You can get around this limitation by Using POST Requests.

Can I exclude PDL IDs in a Company Search call to avoid spending duplicate credits?

You can technically exclude up to 1,000 PDL IDs in a single search query, however you will eventually run into limitations due to our infrastructure. While the PDL ID is mostly persistent, it's possible that the IDs can get merged, deleted, or opted out from our dataset across releases. Additionally, we will truncate extremely long queries in our internal logs, making it more difficult to assist you should you need technical support. At some point in the future, we will place limitations on query length and/or performance time to avoid these costly queries.

Will I be charged for retrieving the same profile multiple times?

Yes. PDL will charge for the retrieval of the same profile.

Example 1
You search for companies in California then conduct another search for companies in San Francisco. You will be charged for the overlap in the second request.

Example 2
You search for companies in California and search again for companies in California. You will be charged the same amount for each request.

Example 1 is a bit more difficult to handle for programmatically and likely needs a UI/UX approach to limit overlapping queries.

To handle for situations demonstrated in Example 2, PDL recommends duplicate call detection. You can use methods like unique key constraints. For example, you can hash the request, storing the hash, and checking for a duplicate call before sending it to the API to avoid the second situation above.