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Show HN: Free Company Logo API
- dperalta 11y agoBrilliant!
- thetylerhayes 11y agoNice, seems super helpful.
- Vexs 11y agoThat's pretty dang cool. Might cause issues if clearbit ever looses the data and a bunch of websites link to it, but that's pretty standard.
- msoad 11y agoI know Glassdoor is using Facebook as a source of their company logos
- ereckers 11y agoI'd like to see that open sourced. A lot of the projects I'm involved in could use it.
- alttab 11y agoThere has to be some level of fair use or copyright involved, no? You are taking corporate images, modifying them, and then distributing their modified brand/logo potentially without their consent. If they don't like the results, they could sue you. Or at least, I feel that would be the case.
- Judson 11y agoI tested a few examples, and it looks to just be parsing the page and returning the apple-touch-icon.
- nandhp 11y agoThat doesn't explain where https://logo.clearbit.com/debian.org https://logo.clearbit.com/debian.org comes from....
- chinathrow 11y agohttps://www.debian.org/favicon.ico https://www.debian.org/favicon.ico can't be the source.
- AUmrysh 11y agoIt looks like that's the Debian icon on Twitter.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agohttps://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1311499343/debian-square.png https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1311499343/debian-squar... Looks like it.
- x5n1 11y agoNot really modifying it. But they may have branding and licensing guidelines that a service like this might not meet which would likely result in a cease and desist rather than an immediate lawsuit.
- jameshart 11y ago'Fair use' only applies to the copyright implications of distributing these images; the far murkier bit of IP law that this gets into is trademark licensing. That's far more likely to be the issue here.
- amolgupta 11y agoThe trend is to have a different logo for apps and websites. another parameter might be helpful.
- Yadi 11y agoBrilliant, this is helpful for building MVP products as well!
- chinathrow 11y agoHow so?
- rcavezza 11y agoHey Alex, This is pretty sweet. Nice job! Is there a post where you talk about the tech behind this API? I've been working on a simple API that finds domain names from company names that I use on projects where I use business intelligence APIs like Clearbit and FullContact.
- chinathrow 11y agoFetch the domain at /, look for favicon/apple-touch-icon/OpenGraph image, fetch the image, store and serve.
- mikepurvis 11y agoLooks like it has twitter as a secondary source, eg. https://logo.clearbit.com/spacex.com https://logo.clearbit.com/spacex.com https://twitter.com/spacex https://twitter.com/spacex Maybe other fallbacks, too?
- artursapek 11y agoGood catch, that's pretty hard to deny
- lips 11y agoAlso seems like some fairly primitive analysis would identify this as a suspect item, at least enough to be shunted off to some sort of triage. Logos, by and large, will have distinctly different data than images. That, and it also doesn't match their favicon.
- maccman 11y agoBehind the scenes we're using Clearbit's Company API which does a lot of sleuthing: scanning the page for social accounts, meta tags etc. Then we try and return the best logo we can find. https://clearbit.com/docs#company-api https://clearbit.com/docs#company-api
- slantyyz 11y ago>> I use business intelligence APIs like Clearbit and FullContact. When I saw the tagline "Business Intelligence APIs" at the top of the posted link, I totally thought Clearbit's line of business was something completely different-- more along the lines of data warehousing, analytics and reporting.
- cmdrfred 11y agoThis is great I will have to remember it.
- sanbor 11y agoI'd be cool if they would provide some insight on how to make an existing website to work with their API. I always wanted to know what's the "standard" way to put a logo in the webpage. Some people uses just an IMG tag, other uses an H1 with an image replacement technique.
- Judson 11y agoLooks like they're just returning the apple-touch-icon if it's available.
- psychometry 11y agoIn my case they're returning an old version of the icon.
- chinathrow 11y agoSame here. Any way to trigger a refresh?
- vmarsy 11y agoBe careful with copyright issues. How do you make it work? Do you scrape them automatically or gather them from the brands marketing materials? I tried different logos, and I find a few issues: https://logo.clearbit.com/mcdonalds.com?size=256 https://logo.clearbit.com/mcdonalds.com?size=256 Mcdonalds US logo background should be red (http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/newsroom/image_and_video_library/logos.html http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/newsroom/image_and_video_l... ) https://logo.clearbit.com/bk.com?size=256 https://logo.clearbit.com/bk.com?size=256 The quality of that one is bad. Wikipedia's one is a .svg : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Burger_King_Logo.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Burger_King_Logo.svg
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoI don't think they'll have copyright issues, it'd probably be considered fair use. As for the McDonalds logo, I suspect the turquoise is because that's the current background colour of mcdonalds.com
- mikepurvis 11y agoOr because it's from here: https://twitter.com/mcdonalds https://twitter.com/mcdonalds
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoAh, that makes more sense. It was mentioned below that it seems to be using Twitter.
- Kiro 11y agoI don't see any red backgrounds in your link.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoPretty cool! I think the API docs could possibly be a bit more precise, though. Perhaps something like this: You can also pass us the following optional query parameters. Parameter Default Description size 128 integer Image size: Length of longest side, in pixels format "png" string File format, either "png" or "jpg" greyscale (not passed) boolean If this parameter is passed, image will be desaturated
- maccman 11y agoGood idea - we'll make this change.
- chejazi 11y agoAs a developer of a URL shortening service, this is incredibly useful. Social platforms scrape the contents of all shared URLs to offer a preview in a feed. With this service I can incorporate the logo of a site's destination URL into the scraped content.
- markbnj 11y agoGreat idea, but something tells me the companies whose logos are available won't like it. It will be interesting to see how they react. Some will probably embrace it, but I can see some of the larger corps acting territorial.
- drivingmenuts 11y agoI would argue opt-in for having your logo with the service, rather than opt-out, but it might be difficult to come up with a benefit that's enticing enough. There's maybe some value in the logo owner being able to get information on who's using their logo (service not yet provided). From the logo-consumer standpoint, it's pretty cool, though, it would be difficult to know if the logo is current enough.
- maceo 11y agoThis has been done before (and posted to HN), and it had the same problem. Way too many false positives, especially with older sites. https://logo.clearbit.com/starfoods.com https://logo.clearbit.com/starfoods.com
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoThis isn't trying to scrape the page and find something vaguely logo-like. Rather, it seems to be using iOS, OpenGraph and Twitter icons. In this case, the site has a strange OpenGraph image specified in its meta tags. If it produces a weird image it's because the site owner has specified an image which isn't their logo. It's not because the API picked a random image. For this service, if it can find an image, it's at least an image the site owner wanted to be used to represent it.
- VivaCascadia 11y agoYeah, really odd choice for an Open Graph image. They specify that burger and soda image directly in their header. <meta property="og:image" content="//nebula.wsimg.com/7cdaeb9fbb87f3450dc65108e6d6af87?AccessKeyId=6E4E9B5CC8D37F66F76C&disposition=0&alloworigin=1">
- todd3834 11y agoI wouldn't have thought that the open graph image is a logo. Seems like that wouldn't be a reliable source for logos
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoFair point. It's at least something they've chosen to represent themselves, however.
- ews 11y agoAnother (big) false positive is craigslist: https://logo.clearbit.com/craigslist.org https://logo.clearbit.com/craigslist.org
- 11y ago
- iLoch 11y agoThis is neat - it could use a background color option along with the ability to fill the logo with white.
- lowglow 11y agoI honestly thought this was going to generate a free logo and got really excited for some unknown reason? I guess I was wondering how it all worked, then I clicked through and it made way more sense. That was a wild ride!
- mmahemoff 11y agoThe post mentions Gravatar, so actually it should do the same thing and return a generated image as a function of the domain, if no known one exists.
- michaelmior 11y agoIt might be nice if that were an option, but having that as the default behaviour would be strange and unexpected IMO.
- david-given 11y agoThat's exactly what I thought. I told it to generate Google's logo and was then quite surprised when it actually produced Google's logo.
- alexhawdon 11y agoThat would be an interesting extension to develop. I agree it should be optional. I'm envisaging scraping colours and fonts from the target domain to recreate a text-only logo.
- mmahemoff 11y agoYou could also use the first letter of the domain as the basis of the logo. (I do something a bit like that on faviconist.com)
- Hovertruck 11y agoNot quite free, but this does exist at a pretty low price point: https://www.tailorbrands.com/ https://www.tailorbrands.com/
- culo 11y agoJust curious.. what do you guys use for API management to handle authentications, logging, rate-limiting, etc.. 1. Open-source solutions like KONG (https://github.com/mashape/kong https://github.com/mashape/kong) or similar? 2. Built in house? 3. Commercial services such as Apigee, Mashery?
- naankari 11y agoNice job. It would also be great if there is option to get image data that can be used in data-uri.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- treve 11y agoWell done!
- smprk 11y agoInstead of relying on FB, Twitter, Company's site for the logo, wouldn't it be better to create a "Company Logo Service" with an API, with the below features - 0. Change at one place, make it work everywhere. (consistent branding across the wild web). 1. Upload your company logo here with us. 2. Multiple versions. 3. Multiple sizes. 4. Control and Connect various sizes, versions with your various social accounts, newsletters, anything. 5. IFTTT support. 6. Get it printed on swag and merchandise. 7. More...?
- allendoerfer 11y agoSeems like a good way to waste money on a service that will very seldom provide value (logo redesigns) and will not work across all platforms thereby introducing an additional thing you have to worry about instead of solving it. Better idea: 1. Take sheet of paper 2. Write down where you use your logo
- smprk 11y agoBiggest fan of working on paper, to the extent of carrying a clipboard in my laptop bag all the time. Along with other gadgets. I wouldn't pay for something like that either. I was suggesting it be offered for free, like gravtaar.
- manigandham 11y agoWouldn't pay money for this. Easier to just have a list of sites where we maintain profiles since we still have to manage that various bits of other information about the company, beyond just the logo (which is probably the thing that changes the least).
- zachsnow 11y agoAbsolutely. Would pay money for this! The question is: how much?
- SeanLuke 11y agoSurely there's a trademark protection concern here.
- SolarNet 11y agoNope, trademarks are used to distinguish brands and ensure their authenticity, and that's exactly what is happening here. If people used this to impersonate another company (e.g. to pretend they had gotten their endorsement) then that's a problem. But as long as this is used as part of a directory (or similar) service there is no copyright or trademark problem.
- gorm 11y agoGreat work! Very useful :)
- c3d 11y agoInternal error for https://logo.clearbit.com/taodyne https://logo.clearbit.com/taodyne :-( We recently chàged server, that might be why.
- Tepix 11y agoWorks great! Minor nitpick: Returns the old logo for Oculus.com
- cstrasen 11y agoHi. Nice idea. Images seem to be scaled not optimally though in same cases seeing jagged edges like here: https://logo.clearbit.com/medigo.com https://logo.clearbit.com/medigo.com
- eonw 11y agoarent there legal requirements about colors, sizes, and placement for logos? for instance you offer gray scale as a setting, i seem to recall all placement of MS logos requires approval and no altering of colors(i could be completely wrong)... are you protecting your users by disallowing them to use logos in ways that might upset the owner?
- dribel 11y agogreat!!!! really really great!
- huntermeyer 11y agoAwesome! Have wanted this for so long!
- geofft 11y agoThis vaguely reminds me of Picons, which was the '90s solution to this problem (Gravatar for domains, but also for newsgroups and people): http://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/faces/picons/ http://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/faces/picons/ If you've ever noticed the little logos on Gmane posts, they come from Picons and favicons.
- zatkin 11y agoDoesn't work for my domain: zk.gd
- apendleton 11y agoAre there terms of service associated with this API? I can't seem to find any.
- yzh 11y agohttps://logo.clearbit.com/armadilloaerospace.com https://logo.clearbit.com/armadilloaerospace.com Where is the armadillo? I want my armadillo.
- repler 11y agoAnd when you use it, they get to collect all of the data about your visitors.
- shedletsky 11y agoThis guy knows what is up.
- pbiggar 11y agoI don't know what clearbit collects, but I would guess that this isn't the business model. Clearbit sells a B2B product - they monetize by charging money for a service directly, not indirectly via "collecting data about your visitors".
- morgante 11y agoIn what way? Nothing about this API requires handing over more than the bare minimum of information (which domains you want logos for). How could they be expected to implement it without that information?
- chias 11y agoThere's also the referrer header that gets sent out, which includes the URL of the page that is embedding the image. Not really "all data on your visitors" but depending on how you use it, may leak sensitive information if you're unwise enough to put it in the page urls (depressingly common), or allow them to track every visit throughout your site (on pages that embed the image)
- morgante 11y agoThere's no reason you have to directly embed the images. If you want to preserve user privacy, you should definitely proxy this API.
- larrybud 11y agoHad to do it: https://logo.clearbit.com/piedpiper.com https://logo.clearbit.com/piedpiper.com
- okonomiyaki3000 11y agoIt's outdated. They need a version or date parameter.
- sordidfellow 11y agoYet another (hilarious?) false match: https://logo.clearbit.com/exxon.com https://logo.clearbit.com/exxon.com
- MichaelGG 11y agoThat's because Exxon specified that image. Check the HTML on exxon.com: <meta property="og:image" content="http://www.exxon.com/assets/imgs/en-us/energy-live-here-facebook.jpg">
- imissmyjuno 11y agoThat doesn't change the fact that it's a false positive…
- mukgupta 11y agoI noticed that you are returning the company name in the title. https://logo.clearbit.com/fb.com https://logo.clearbit.com/fb.com .Is that intentional? Asking this because you provide a Company API too which is paid.
- captn3m0 11y agoThis API call is just returning a PNG image with almost no EXIF data. In that case, the title is set by browsers to the filename, which is equal to the domain name itself. Are you seeing something else in the title? (I see fb.com)
- mukgupta 11y agoStrange. I see Facebook in the title
- mukgupta 11y agoSaw this in response headers. Content-Disposition:"inline; filename="Facebook.png"" I am using firefox which apparently uses this header to set the title. Chrome OTOH won't do it
- captn3m0 11y agoInteresting. I did look at headers, but missed the Content-Disposition for some reason.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- imaginenore 11y agoYou need a better upscaling algorithm. https://logo.clearbit.com/alexa.com?size=512 https://logo.clearbit.com/alexa.com?size=512 Ideally all your logos should be in vector and rendered to any size (or at least powers of 2 for easier caching).
- ARolek 11y agoKiller work Alex! It's crazy you just rolled this out. We have been in development on something very similar but have yet to make a public push on the product. The main difference is we host the vector source file and build rasters from it. This helps maintain top quality at any size, and allows us to output to additional formats (i.e. PDF). The product is still in alpha, but it's amazing how many similarities we came to with the URL scheme design. For example, image embedding: https://img.ogol.io/<domain.com> https://img.ogol.io/<domain.com> example: https://img.ogol.io/ogol.io https://img.ogol.io/ogol.io we also support downloading https://dl.ogol.io/<domain.com> https://dl.ogol.io/<domain.com> example: https://dl.ogol.io/ogol.io https://dl.ogol.io/ogol.io Each logo also has it's own page to make working with the asset outside of an API easy. https://ogol.io/ogol.io/nn0ymd https://ogol.io/ogol.io/nn0ymd Our approach requires companies to confirm their domains and associate a vector logo with the domain. Your strategy obviously provides a lot of logos right out of the gates. Logos are such a pain to deal with, it's great to see the problem being attacked from a few different angles.
- maccman 11y agoogol.io is a pretty awesome idea! Love it.
- oefrha 11y agoI'm curious about the claim "pixel perfect every time" seen on your home page. Do you employ some special algorithm to scale images, or do you just use the standard tools? As far as I know, scaling vector graphics isn't enough to guarantee pixel perfection (especially not at low resolutions), and low-res logos are usually hand-crafted by designers. Maybe you should also allow companies to upload raster logos?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- markrages 11y agohttps://logo.clearbit.com/news.ycombinator.com https://logo.clearbit.com/news.ycombinator.com
- fizx 11y agoDoesn't work, though https://logo.clearbit.com/ycombinator.com https://logo.clearbit.com/ycombinator.com does.
- jstsch 11y agoWorks great! But I do wonder where it came from... parsed the HTML, grabbed the SVG and converted it to PNG... or simply got it from Twitter? https://logo.clearbit.com/h5mag.com https://logo.clearbit.com/h5mag.com from... <img class="logo" src="/img/h5mag-logo.svg" alt="logo H5mag">
- prawn 11y agoIf you're using Twitter as a source for company logos, you might be serving a lot of rainbow icons this week!
- thesimon 11y agoWorked on something similar on a local open data hackathon before, but instead I used a scraper to parse the logos. https://github.com/c0dr/LogoParser https://github.com/c0dr/LogoParser It worked okay for like 40% of the sites, and for the rest of the sites we used Python and scikit-learn to detect the logo from the page (threw all images of the page in the script and it returned if it was a logo or not). And this actually worked quite good, irrc over 90% of the test cases worked. https://github.com/tomsrocket/image-classification https://github.com/tomsrocket/image-classification But yeah, using Twitter as a source might also be a good idea.
- jakerockland 11y agoThinking perhaps we have something set up odd in our HTML that's tripping up the API, but a bit confused why this seems to be returning nothing https://logo.clearbit.com/korkapp.com https://logo.clearbit.com/korkapp.com Any thoughts anyone?
- dempseye 11y agoThis is an excellent piece of marketing.
- dempseye 11y agoThis is an excellent piece of marketing.
- maxdemarzi 11y agoWhere do companies like clearbit and full contact get their user data?
- jtwebman 11y agoIsn't that what the favicon.ico in the root of your site for?
- MikeTLive 11y agoseems a simple change to gravatar to allow registration and use of simply the domain name to host the Corp Logo would be a 10 minute change.
- prawn 11y agoWish there was an equivalent service but with masked images of wine bottles. Always wanted to create something like Delicious Monster but for wine cellars. All the sites/apps doing it are pretty ugly or largely text based.
- lightyrs 11y agoGreat API, thank you! I made a little hubot script for this: https://www.npmjs.com/package/hubot-logo https://www.npmjs.com/package/hubot-logo Use it like this: hubot logo stripe.com
- digital-rubber 11y agoAnd in the meantime you don't want to warn people about the information they are leaking using your API?
- tempodox 11y agoHow would a logo image file have to be named to be found by this?
- Goliney 11y agoMaccman, Logaster offers own API which will generate logos. If you interested read more here https://www.logaster.com/about-logaster/api/ https://www.logaster.com/about-logaster/api/
- malcolmocean 11y agouhh... https://logo.clearbit.com/amazon.com https://logo.clearbit.com/amazon.com
- k4rtik 11y agoLate to the party, but this looks interesting. Google does something similar for extracting favicons for any domain, such as https://plus.google.com/_/favicon?domain=github.com https://plus.google.com/_/favicon?domain=github.com