FindZebra API

With the API it is possible to use computer programs and scripts to make lookups in FindZebra's online search engine.

FindZebra’s API is provided free of charge for non-commercial use. We reserve the right to block access for API users who put FindZebra’s API servers under undue load. If you are interested in using FindZebra’s API commercially or unsure whether your use case will be acceptable please get in touch at contact@findzebra.com.

Using the API

Using FindZebra's API requires that you include your personal API key with each request. You can see your existing API key or get a new one on your account page when you are signed in.

To use the api, make a HTTP GET request to https://www.findzebra.com/api/v1/query.

Parameter Description
api_key required A valid api key. Get yours from your account page on findzebra.com.
q The search query containing the search terms that you are interested in.
response_format The format that you would like the response to be in. The available options are json (default), xml, csv, python, ruby, and php.
rows The maximum number of results to include in the response. The default is 10 and it can't be larger than 100. If you need more results you must make additional API requests and use the start parameter to get the next page of results.
start The start parameter specifies an offset into a query’s result set and instructs the API to return results starting from this offset in the response. For instance setting start = 5 and rows = 10 will return results number 6 to 15. The default value when this parameter isn't explicitly set is 0.
fl A comma separated list of fields that you would like to be included in the result. The list of available fields are listed in the table below. By default all fields are included in the result. Note that not all search results in the response necessarily contains all fields as fields are only included for the results where the data exists. Especially the availability of genes varies a lot.

Avaliable fields

Field Description
title String with the title of the document.
display_content String with the actual content of the document. It may be very long and formatted using HTML.
source String that indicates where the document is from. Currently, all documents in the corpus has one of the following 6 source strings: ghr, gard, omim, wikipedia, gene_reviews, or orphanet.
source_url String containing the url of the original document.
genes A list of genes that are associated with the disease along with the estimated strength of the association. The format of each gene in the list is gene_identifier:association_strength. gene_identifier is a string that identifies the gene. association_strength is the estimated degree to which the gene is associated with the disease given as a number in the range 0 to 1 as indicated by DisGeNET.
cui The Concept Unique Identifier (CUI) from the Unified Medical Language System for the disease that the result document is about.
score The score indicates how closely the result document matches the query string as determined by the search engine. The better the document matches the given query, the larger the score. This is a positive floating point number. Note that there is no limit to how large the score for a result may be. Furthermore, the scores can't be compared between different search queries.

The search results will be ordered by their scores whether or not the scores are actually included as a field to be returned with the search results.