Officer Search Results Ordering

[s_aspin]

Hi, is it possible to influence the order of results from the Officer Search API (Search company officers)

If I was to search ‘John Smith’ I would like to get exact matches back first before other less likely results. For example the first result currently returned is ‘FRASER JOHN LYTTLETON SMITH’ while there are plenty of other ‘JOHN SMITH’ results included later on.

Alternatively is it possible to specify an exact match only and exclude any fuzzier results?

If I could get the more likely matches first I could page through the results until a certain point and then stop consuming.

Thanks

Sam

[rohit.bhardwaj]

Hi,

Did you find any solution to your problem?

Thanks
Rohit

[yassinemarrakchi28]

I would like to have the answer of that question as well…

[voracityemail]

As far as I’m aware, if it’s not in the latest documentation it’s not there.

I am not aware of such a feature. Although these are now a bit old please see Companies House’ own responses about “what does search do and why?”:

OfficerSearch - Search Functionality

@weijian We do not provide functionality to support exact first/name matching. The searching provided is based on relevance so we would expect the most relevant to be returned in priority order, so you can cycle through the results giving you the flexibility to develop to your user need. Thanks, @mfairhurst

For search/companies query - what does it search and how

The search is not a simple search through a couple of fields, it is a complex search with parsed search terms against a pre-built index of multiple fields and combinations of fields, utilising partial matching, inverted-indexes, frequency algorithms, cadence, weighted scores, fuzzy matching, stemming, synonyms, company name ending synonyms (English and Welsh), soundex etc. The search does not search our company names and numbers directly, but rather searches multiple INDEXES of the company names…

[mike2]

@s_aspin

If I was to search ‘John Smith’ I would like to get exact matches back first before other less likely results. For example the first result currently returned is ‘FRASER JOHN LYTTLETON SMITH’ while there are plenty of other ‘JOHN SMITH’ results included later on.

Alternatively is it possible to specify an exact match only and exclude any fuzzier results?

Hi,

We maintain a connected database of Companies House appointments and have a public API with free calls.

Both our ‘Find UK company officers’ and ‘Find UK companies’ use a combination of exact and ‘starts with’ approaches and are returned by descending Lucene search score.

I think this will give you what you want - but this forum doesn’t allow me to post links direct to the endpoints??

email me at mike@regulationtechnologies[.]com and I can send more info

Cheers,
Mike