Input Parameters - Person Search API

Required Parameters

You must provide either the query or the sql parameter (but not both) to receive a successful response. We recommend using the Elasticsearch query parameter for most use cases.

When you execute an API request, the query runs directly against our Person Dataset without any cleaning or preprocessing. This means that you have a lot of freedom to explore the dataset and return the perfect records for your particular use case. It also means that you will need to understand the available fields to make successful queries.

Use the field descriptions on the Person Schema and the underlying Elasticsearch Mapping to help write better queries.

To help you identify how to best query for specific sub-entities (schools, companies, and locations), we offer a suite of Cleaner APIs.

We also provide a free Query Builder Tool to help write and test Elasticsearch queries for our Search APIs.

api_key

Your API Key must be included in either the request header or the api_key parameter. For more information about request authentication, see the Authentication page.

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Optional Parameters

query

Elasticsearch Query Limitations

The query value should align directly with the Elasticsearch DSL.

We accept the following Elasticsearch query types:

• term
• terms
• exists
• bool
• match
• range
• match_phrase
• wildcard
• prefix
• match_all

We've disabled most specialized options, such as boosting and custom scoring, and we do not allow aggregations.

Any array in a query (such as a terms array) will have a hard limit of 1000 elements. If a request goes over this limit, it will fail.

sql

SQL Query Limitations

We execute SQL queries using Elasticsearch SQL.

We accept any SQL query that translates to the above Elasticsearch query types through the ES SQL translate API.

We will ignore any use of column selections or the LIMIT keyword.

We limit the number of wildcard terms (using LIKE with %) to 20 per request. If a request goes over this limit, it will fail.

You must use subfields rather than top-level fields when making SQL queries. For example, SELECT * FROM person WHERE experience IS NOT NULL will fail but SELECT * FROM person WHERE experience.title.name IS NOT NULL will behave as expected.

size

from

❗️

Legacy Field

The from parameter is deprecated. Use scroll_token instead.

scroll_token

A scroll_token returns in every Person Search API response and serves as a placeholder or bookmark for the last record received. For queries with more results than can fit in a single API response (see the size field), use the scroll_token to get the next batch of results.

For example, if you send a query to the Person Search API that has 10,000 matches, you will need multiple API calls to retrieve all the records. The scroll_token represents how far along you are in that list of records.

Generally, the way to use scroll_token is:

1. Send a query to the Person Search API.
2. Get a response back containing one batch of records as well as a scroll_token response value (if you have already retrieved all the available records in this batch, then the scroll_token value will be null).
3. Use the same query from Step 1 and the scroll_token you just received to make another request to the Person Search API.
4. Get another response back with the next batch of records and a new scroll_token value.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you have received the desired number of records or until you receive a 404 status code because pagination is complete and the scroll_token key is missing from the response.

For a detailed working example of this process, see the following code example: Bulk Retrieval.

dataset

You can input multiple datasets by separating each with a comma.

Valid dataset names are:

• all
• resume
• email
• phone
• mobile_phone
• street_address
• consumer_social
• developer

See Person Stats for details about each dataset.

You can exclude dataset(s) by using - as the first character. Entering - will exclude all of the comma-separated datasets following the character and needs to be entered only once. For example, "all,-phone,consumer_social" will include search results from every dataset except the phone and consumer_social datasets.

titlecase

pretty