Finding a business

This page is for anyone who needs to look up one organization, for example an app where a provider says "this is my business". People type a business as a name, as a website address, or with a slightly different spelling, and all of those should find it.

curl -sS -H "X-API-Key: $TAILEND_API_KEY" --get https://api.tailend.dev/v1/philadelphia/organizations \
  --data-urlencode "q=designgym.com" \
  --data-urlencode "limit=5"

const res = await fetch(
  "https://api.tailend.dev/v1/philadelphia/organizations?q=" + encodeURIComponent("design gym"),
  { headers: { "X-API-Key": process.env.TAILEND_API_KEY } },
);
const { data } = await res.json();
console.log(data[0].name, data[0].score, data[0].match);

{
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "a158148a-52d4-4ea3-a6b9-0c830ddc6768",
      "name": "designgym.co",
      "website_url": "https://www.designgym.co",
      "score": 0.94,
      "match": "domain"
    }
  ]
}

(Other fields are omitted above.) One request is enough. You do not need to try several spellings.

#What q understands

• Casing, punctuation and spacing do not matter. Design Gym, design-gym and DESIGN GYM are the same search.
• Endings are set aside, on both sides of the comparison: LLC, Inc, The, & Co, and address endings such as .com, .co, .org, .net, .io and .us. designgym.com finds an organization named designgym.co.
• Spaces do not matter. design gym finds designgym, and the other way round.
• A website address or pasted URL works. designgym.com, https://www.designgym.com/classes and www.designgym.com all search by the address. An organization is found by its own website whether or not website_url is filled in.
• A small typo still finds it. desing gym finds designgym.
• Part of a name works too. gym finds organizations with gym in their name, ranked below closer matches. A very short fragment is not searched as a part of a name, and a near miss never ranks above a name that contains what you typed.
• Words like the, and or co are not a search. A query made only of those, or only of endings such as llc or .com, returns an empty list with a meta.hint saying so.
• Pages on shared platforms do not identify a business. A social page, a booking widget, a link-in-bio page or a website builder address is never an exact_domain, so one provider's page cannot be mistaken for another's.

Only organizations with a live listing in the metro are searched.

#Reading the result

Every result carries two fields when you send q:

match is one of:

Results are ordered best first, then by name. page, limit and cursor work as they do everywhere else; see Pagination.

A good rule for "is this my business": treat exact_name and exact_domain as a confident match, name and domain with a high score as a likely one worth confirming with the person, and fuzzy as a suggestion. A domain match on a different ending (acme.org for acme.com) is a suggestion to confirm, not a confirmation, and so is the same registered domain on another host. An empty list means we found nothing close, which is also worth telling the person.

#Website address

website_url is the organization's own website. When none is recorded, it is the address of the site the organization itself runs, if we have one. It stays null when there is nothing trustworthy to show.