Getting basic stock & company information given company name

Question

Given a company name, say Google, I want to be able to identify the link to the company profile page in say

• Google Finance (eg. https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOG)
• Bloomberg (http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/GOOG:US)

and extract company information eg. "Google Inc. is a global technology company that provides a web based search engine through its website. The Company offers a wide range of search options, including web, image, groups, directory, and news searches"

How can I do it, I think I need some API to identify the stock ticker based on company name, then somehow build the URL to the appropriate site? It seems Bloomberg has an API, but its very large, could someone point me in the right direction?

For the 1st requirement, it seems from another question, a query to Yahoo Finance API can do the trick:

http://autoc.finance.yahoo.com/autoc?query=yahoo&callback=YAHOO.Finance.SymbolSuggest.ssCallback

But it doesn't seem to provide the needed info for building the URL to Bloomberg (missing country info?).

Answer 1

EDIT:

Looks like LinkedIn has significantly changed their API (see https://developer.linkedin.com/support/developer-program-transition).

Therefore the accepted answer no longer works.

A bit of light googling suggests that a variety of "freemium" providers exist, such as https://clearbit.com/ and https://www.fullcontact.com/developer/company-api/, but YMMV.

ORIGINAL ANSWER:

LinkedIn has an API that meets your stated requirements.

The Company Profile API: Retrieves and displays one or more company profiles based on the company ID or universal name. Returns basic company profile data, such as name, website, and industry. Returns handles to additional company content, such as RSS stream and Twitter feed.

https://developer-programs.linkedin.com/documents/company-lookup-api-and-fields

Answer 2

There is an entire directory of APIs for web programming at Programmable Web, they have over 8000 APIs currently. I would think they should have everything you need. http://www.programmableweb.com/apis