Advanced Search - company_name

I’m using the Advanced Search as documented here: Companies House Public Data API: Advanced search for a company

My hope was to massively reduce the data set returned, by requiring a partial match on the name. I wanted to bring back a list of companies that have MGCRM in the name using:

https://api.company-information.service.gov.uk/advanced-search/companies?company_name=mgcrm

It doesn’t work and seems to completely ignore the parameter and value.

Other searches such as location and sic_codes seem to work, for example:
https://api.company-information.service.gov.uk/advanced-search/companies?sic_codes=49320&location=london

I found this the other day when looking for the same thing:

I ended up using the data product to just download the whole database and then it was much easier to filter

Would be useful to get the live data though so following this thread to see if / when there is an update.

Thanks for the pointer.

Comment says it will come in 2022, but it’s not clear from the documentation work is still in progress.

Yes, we tried the bulk data product as well, but it sadly won’t contain dissolved companies, which is simply insufficient for our use case.

We also tried to compute the dissolved companies ourselves by looking at diffs across subsequent bulk data exports. However, these are not kept historically so that’s not an option either.

Looking forward to this advanced search coming to the API in 2022, it’s absolutely essential.

ditto here but I tried using basic searches with timeout error as below:-

  1. GET http://api.company-information.service.gov.uk/search/companies?company_name=vodafone
    Error: connect ETIMEDOUT 18.171.19.160:80

  2. GET http://api.company-information.service.gov.uk/search/companies?q=vodafone
    Error: connect ETIMEDOUT 18.135.180.105:80

Isn’t basic search available or I missed out something in the API?? welcome advice

I met the same problem. @MArkWilliams help us please

you must use https not http

Hello @MArkWilliams, any update on this?

Advanced company search is returning no results when hitting:

GET https://api.company-information.service.gov.uk/search/companies?company_name=vodafone

That is because you are not using the correct URL.
the documentation Companies House Public Data API: Advanced search for a company
specifies the URL as
https://api.company-information.service.gov.uk/advanced-search/companies
not what you are using
https://api.company-information.service.gov.uk/search/companies?company_name=vodafone
Hope that helps

After some investigation, I have discovered that there is an error in the documentation. The query parameter company_name has been changed to company_name_includes.
So sorry about this. I am trying to get the documentation corrected.
So a call to
https://api.company-information.service.gov.uk/advanced-search/companies?company_name_includes=vodaphone
will get something like
{
:
:
“top_hit”: {
“company_name”: “VODAPHONE LIMITED”,
“company_number”: “02373469”,
“company_status”: “active”,
“company_type”: “ltd”,
“kind”: “search-results#company”,
“links”: {
“company_profile”: “/company/02373469”
},
“date_of_creation”: “1989-04-18”,
“registered_office_address”: {
“address_line_1”: “Vodafone House”,
“address_line_2”: “The Connection”,
“locality”: “Newbury”,
“postal_code”: “RG14 2FN”,
“region”: “Berkshire”
},
“sic_codes”: [“70100”]
},
“items”: [{
“company_name”: “VODAPHONE LIMITED”,
“company_number”: “02373469”,
“company_status”: “active”,
“company_type”: “ltd”,
“kind”: “search-results#company”,
“links”: {
“company_profile”: “/company/02373469”
},
“date_of_creation”: “1989-04-18”,
“registered_office_address”: {
“address_line_1”: “Vodafone House”,
“address_line_2”: “The Connection”,
“locality”: “Newbury”,
“postal_code”: “RG14 2FN”,
“region”: “Berkshire”
},
“sic_codes”: [“70100”]
}],
“kind”: “search#advanced-search”,
“hits”: 1
}

Hope that helps (more)

3 Likes

Thank you very much Mark - I was facing similar issues with the advanced search.
Can I reach you directly about another documentation issue related with the simple search?

https://developer-specs.company-information.service.gov.uk/companies-house-public-data-api/reference/search/search-companies

The list of the possible values for the ‘restriction’ parameters and what are they meant for is not provided there. Can you please update the documentation there?

Carefully reading on the existing documentation only makes us guess two possible values:
the “active-companies” and “legally-equivalent-company-name”

Thanks a lot for this, it works good for me, I would struggle so much if I would not find your article!