Autocomplete

The Autocomplete API included in API v4.0 is intended to help you quickly find the entity you are looking for by suggesting a list of entities based on your query string & the defined collection(s) you are interested in.

To make a request using our Autocomplete APIs, you must provide the following:

• a user key
• a query string (e.g. Box)

You can also further customize the API response by...

• including "collection_ids" in the parameter of the request to tell the Autocomplete API to only suggest entities within the collection(s) specified
• including "limit" in the parameter of the request to limit how many results are returned per page (note: max of 25)

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Pro Tips: Use Autocomplete API to help with Entity Lookup & Search APIs

A popular use case for the Autocomplete API is to find the UUID or permalink that you need as inputs to the search API or the entity lookup API

• Find the UUID/permalink of the category and location that you want to use as the search criteria for your Search API
• Find the UUID/permalink of the company that you want to enrich using the Entity Lookup API

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Pro Tips: Get more specific with collection_ids

You can query against multiple collections

• ex: "collection_ids=categories,category_groups"

You can narrow down even further by adding a specific facet of the collection

• locations --> location.cities, location.regions, location.countries, location.groups (e.g. SF Bay Area)
• organizations --> organization.companies, organization.investors, organization.schools
• people --> person.investors
• principals --> principal.investors

Example request

In bash or zsh, set CRUNCHBASE_API_KEY to your provisioned key as shown in Make your first API request.

curl --include --get 'https://api.crunchbase.com/v4/data/autocompletes' \
  --data-urlencode 'query=airbnb' \
  --data-urlencode 'collection_ids=organization.companies' \
  --data-urlencode 'limit=10' \
  --header "X-cb-user-key: $CRUNCHBASE_API_KEY" \
  --header 'Accept: application/json'

Check: the status line is HTTP 200 and the JSON body contains an entities array. Inspect the suggestions before selecting one. Use the chosen result's identifier.uuid or identifier.permalink for a lookup or supported search predicate. An empty array means this query returned no suggestions.

To adapt the request, change query and collection_ids:

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Autocomplete is NOT the same as disambiguation / matching

It's important to understand the difference between autocomplete and disambiguation/matching:

Autocomplete is intended to drive a human process to choose the entity based on what they have typed, and the presumption made is that people will type letters until they see the thing they're looking for.

On the other hand, disambiguation/matching takes as much information as possible and tries as hard as possible to return the most correct match.