Search (DQL)

Searching the Diffbot Knowledge Graph starts with understanding the query language to retrieve it.

Diffbot Query Language (DQL) is a syntax for precisely communicating what we want returned from the Knowledge Graph. While query languages may be familiar to many developers and data team members, non-technical users need not be scared by the jargon. With a few “rules of thumb” and access to our additional resources, you’ll be crafting insight-producing queries in no time!

A simple DQL query looks like this:

type:Organization locations.city.name:"San Francisco" nbEmployees>5000

This query is searching for all Organizations (type:Organization) located in San Francisco (locations.city.name:"San Francisco") with more than 5000 employees (nbEmployees>5000).

You can see the results of the query in the dashboard.

Where to Enter DQL

You can pass queries to the Knowledge Graph via API, the “query” tab of Search in the Dashboard, or a number of places in our integrations.

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All queries begin with the type of entity you want returned

The syntax here is simply type: followed by the name of the entity type. (e.g. type:Organization)

To see how many of each entity type are available simply search for all entities of a given type with no additional filters.

DQL Examples

Check out this page on our website for a library of query examples.

Learn How to Use DQL

The rest of this section is a complete reference to every method and operator available to DQL. For a more in-depth guide, check out the Search Basics tutorial .