movie search option

[hemi519]

Hi All,

Can any one tell me if i can find any api for searching movie names like the option that is there on facebook. As soon u start writing movie name it will give you suggestions and u can select from that dropdown. After that we can submit to our database. If there is any API which gives me dropdown of suggestions please let me know. Not only for Movies if it is for Sports,Musics,Books, hobbies will also be helpful

[djr33]

What you are looking for is an autofill script. There are a few approaches and it will be easy to find one if you search for it.

But you'll need a full database of every possible match-- all movie titles, all book titles, all song titles... and I'm not sure where you'd get that. You probably need to pay a company or you could build it yourself.

[hemi519]

Thanks for the info, is there any company that can provide all these things. But how facebook is doing all these. Are they having database for everything or they are paying.

[djr33]

I don't have any specific information, but I believe that, for example, Amazon uses their own database. They have enough money that they can maintain a database like that. (And as the old saying goes, "time is money" so it doesn't matter if they're buying it or making it themselves-- either way it's not easy to do without a lot of money and resources.)

Facebook is of course built from a database-- that's where everything is stored for the entire site. (I don't know any details beyond that about their setup. I'm sure if you search around you could find some.) The friends dropdown uses Ajax (a method of requesting information from the server using Javascript). When you type a few letters, they are sent to the server and the server tells the browser what possible matches may be.

This works the same way on google search. It's listing a different kind of matches, but the technology is similar.


As for purchasing all of this information, I really have no idea. You'd need to look hard for it, and I doubt it is available for free.

[hemi519]

Thanks for the info. I will try to google it out and post back the information if i get anything. might be helpful to any others.

[djr33]

I forgot to mention one thing earlier:
For a project that I had (this month) involving organizing books I looked for something similar and it was difficult. There are some services out there (usually APIs that allow you to query) but they aren't complete. So if you only want the most popular books then that may work, but for my purposes (organizing a linguistics library) it wasn't very helpful.

Several APIs like that do exist, though, and they may continue to improve in the future. So I would recommend looking into them, at least as an option. It will get a little complicated if you then need to also use movies and other media.

Specifically what I was looking for was information from an ISBN [book identification number, on barcode] to convert it to title, author, etc. I don't know if these APIs would allow searching by first letters of the title, such as "Harry Pott" returning "Harry Potter". If not, there still may be other similar services.