Question

I run IMDbAPI.com and have been using Bing’s Search API for finding IMDb ID’s from title searches. Bing is currently changing their API over to the Azure Marketplace (August 1st) and is no longer available for free. I started testing my API using Freebase to resolve these ID’s and hit their 100k limit in the first 8 hours (my site currently gets about 3 million requests a day, but only 200-300k are title searches)

This is exactly why they offer the data dump files,

I downloaded most of the files in the Film folder but cannot find where they are storing the “/authority/imdb/title” imdb id namespace data.

https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/mqlread?query={“type”:”/film/film”,”name”:”True%20Grit”,”imdb_id”:null,”initial_release_date>=”:”1969-01″,”limit”:1}

This is how I’m currently accessing the ID.

Does anyone know which file contains this information? and how to link back to it from the film title/id?

Answer 1

That imdb_id property is backed by a key in the /authority/imdb/title namespace, so you’re looking for the line:

/m/015gxt       /type/object/key        /authority/imdb/title   tt0065126

in the file http://download.freebase.com/datadumps/latest/freebase-datadump-quadruples.tsv.bz2

That’s a 4 GB file, so be prepared to wait a little while for the download. Note that everything is keyed by MID, so you’ll need to figure that out first if you don’t have it in your database.

The equivalent query using MQL instead of the data dumps is https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/mqlread?query=%7B%22type%22%3a%22/film/film%22,%22name%22%3a%22True%20Grit%22,%22imdb_id%22%3anull,%22initial_release_date%3E=%22%3a%221969-01%22,%22mid%22:null,%22key%22:%5B{%22namespace%22:%22/authority/imdb/title%22}],%22limit%22:1%7D&indent=1

EDIT: p.s. I’m pretty sure the files in the Browse directory are going away, so I wouldn’t depend on them even if you could find the info there.