Last week, we push out an update to the Company Profile API. In this update:
- We updated the endpoint to return 404 status code when a request is made to scrape an invalid the platform company.
- Added follower_count to the API endpoint
- Revamped the parsing method to improve the speed of the endpoint
null doom
Before this update, the Company Profile Endpoint returns a HTTP status of 200 for every request, even if the company is invalid. Along with a 200 status code, every field was null if an invalid company ID was given.
With the new update, the null party has ended. Invalid companies will be return with a status code of 404.
Note: Credits are consumed as per normal when Requests return 404 . This is because the work of scraping is committed and completed.
Rewriting the parser for efficiency
A few weeks ago, we launched a new the platform Person Profile API Endpoint with a new parser that improved the time to complete a request from 15-25 seconds to 10 seconds.
Instead of patching fixes for many bugs on our the platform Company Profile Endpoint, we decided to learn from our experience with the Person Profile Endpoint. We rewrite the parser for the Company Profile endpoint. The beautiful side effect is that the endpoint now returns in around 10 seconds, and often, faster than that.
follower_count
While rewriting the parser, we realized we could add a new follower_count field. And so we added that.
The field tells you how many followers this company has on the platform.