Simon Willison’s Weblog

Is there an API that returns metadata for a given URL?

31st May 2012

My answer to Is there an API that returns metadata for a given URL? on Quora

I suggest taking a look at http://embed.ly/—it can take a huge range of URLs and turn them in to JSON metadata. Here’s what it can do with a Wikipedia page: http://embed.ly/docs/explore/obj...—and here’s Google Maps URL (not as useful, but still some interesting metadata extracted) http://embed.ly/docs/explore/obj...

Posted 31st May 2012 at 4:01 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

The Summer of Johann: prompt injections as far as the eye can see - 15th August 2025
Open weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across providers - 15th August 2025
LLM 0.27, the annotated release notes: GPT-5 and improved tool calling - 11th August 2025

This is Is there an API that returns metadata for a given URL? by Simon Willison, posted on 31st May 2012.

apis 94 urls 79 web-services 26 quora 1005

Next: What is the most efficient way to lookup an object (e.g. a user) by only a string?

Previous: How did art.sy get a ".sy" url?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe