Yes, the api is at https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srsearc… There's a sandbox where you can play with the various options: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox#action=query&format=js… On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 2:22 PM Tim Finin <finin(a)umbc.edu> wrote:

>> import pywikibot >> from pywikibot import pagegenerators >> query = 'bush -wbhasstatement:"P31=Q215380"' >> repo = pywikibot.Site().data_repository() >> searchgen = pagegenerators.SearchPageGenerator(query,site=repo) >> for item in searchgen:

>>

Yes, the api is at https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srsearc… There's a sandbox where you can play with the various options: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox#action=query&format=js… On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 2:22 PM Tim Finin &lt;finin(a)umbc.edu <mailto:finin@umbc.edu>> wrote: What's the best way to search Wikidata for items whose name or alias matches a string?  The search available via pywikibot seems to only find a match if the search string is a prefix of an item's name or alias, so searching for "Bush" does not return any of the the George Bush items. I don't want to use a SPARQL query with a regex, since I expect that to be slow. The search box on the Wikidata pages is closer to what I want.  Is there a good way to call this via an API? Ideally, I'd like to be able to specify a language and also a set of types, but I can do that once I've identified candidates based on a simple match with a query string. _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata