Stock ticker symbol lookup API

Question

Is there any sort of API that just offers a simple symbol lookup service? i.e., input a company name and it will tell you the ticker symbol? I've tried just screen-scraping Google Finance, but after a little while it rate limits you and you have to enter a CAPTCHA. I'm trying to batch-lookup about 2000 ticker symbols. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can use yahoo's symbol lookup like so:

http://d.yimg.com/autoc.finance.yahoo.com/autoc?query=yahoo&callback=YAHOO.Finance.SymbolSuggest.ssCallback

Where query is the company name.

You'll get something like this in return:

YAHOO.Finance.SymbolSuggest.ssCallback(
{
    "ResultSet": {
        "Query": "ya",
        "Result": [
            {
                "symbol": "YHOO",
                "name": "Yahoo! Inc.",
                "exch": "NMS",
                "type": "S",
                "exchDisp": "NASDAQ"
            },
            {
                "symbol": "AUY",
                "name": "Yamana Gold, Inc.",
                "exch": "NYQ",
                "type": "S",
                "exchDisp": "NYSE"
            },
            {
                "symbol": "YZC",
                "name": "Yanzhou Coal Mining Co. Ltd.",
                "exch": "NYQ",
                "type": "S",
                "exchDisp": "NYSE"
            },
            {
                "symbol": "YRI.TO",
                "name": "YAMANA GOLD INC COM NPV",
                "exch": "TOR",
                "type": "S",
                "exchDisp": "Toronto"
            },
            {
                "symbol": "8046.TW",
                "name": "NAN YA PRINTED CIR TWD10",
                "exch": "TAI",
                "type": "S",
                "exchDisp": "Taiwan"
            },
            {
                "symbol": "600319.SS",
                "name": "WEIFANG YAXING CHE 'A'CNY1",
                "exch": "SHH",
                "type": "S",
                "exchDisp": "Shanghai"
            },
            {
                "symbol": "1991.HK",
                "name": "TA YANG GROUP",
                "exch": "HKG",
                "type": "S",
                "exchDisp": "Hong Kong"
            },
            {
                "symbol": "1303.TW",
                "name": "NAN YA PLASTIC TWD10",
                "exch": "TAI",
                "type": "S",
                "exchDisp": "Taiwan"
            },
            {
                "symbol": "0294.HK",
                "name": "YANGTZEKIANG",
                "exch": "HKG",
                "type": "S",
                "exchDisp": "Hong Kong"
            },
            {
                "symbol": "YAVY",
                "name": "Yadkin Valley Financial Corp.",
                "exch": "NMS",
                "type": "S",
                "exchDisp": "NASDAQ"
            }
        ]
    }
}
)

Which is JSON and very easy to work with.

Hush... don't tell anybody.