Microlink is a free API to extract structured data from YouTube, Twitter, SoundCloud. It takes a link from you of any supported service and extracts the essential data from it in JSON format. For example, for YouTube, it can extract data about a video like author, dimension, publisher, size, description, URL, logo, background color, and some others. And you can see all this data in JSON format and save on your PC.
Currently, it supports services like YouTube, SoundCloud, Twitter, Instagram, Vimeo, TheVerge, Wikipedia, Facebook, Medium, and some others. To get the data, you can either use its web interface or make API calls from command line. Additionally, there are some code snippets also available in different programming languages which you can use.
If you need some necessary data from websites that Microlink supports then you can use it easily. You just have to use the link of any target webpage to get the structured data. And if you want to use this API in your applications then you can easily do that. It provides free code snippets for programming languages like Node.js, Python, JavaScript, cURL, etc. And you can get them from the main websites of this tool.
Using this Free API to Extract Structured Data from YouTube, Twitter, SoundCloud:
I have mentioned earlier that there are two ways to get the data using this website. You can make the API calls from your PC or use the web interface. In the free version, it lets you make 250 request per day which is good for individual or personal use. And creating an account isn’t necessary while using the free version.
So, copy the URL from a YouTube page or from any service that this website offers. After that, paste the URL in the text box and hit enter. Now, wait for a few seconds and it will fetch the data for you that you can see in JSON format. After that, you can copy that and then use it wherever you want.
Apart from using the webs interface, you can use command prompt or terminal for the same. You can use cURL to make the API requests and get the data. See the screenshot below.
curl "https://api.microlink.io/?url=TargetURL"
In the above screenshots, you can see how this API works to get you the structured data. If you often need that data for your projects or any other work, then this tool, Microlink is very powerful to do that. It just needs the URL of the target page to extract essential data from it in a few seconds.
Final thoughts
Microlink is an amazing and powerful service for developers and researchers to quickly extract structured data from websites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. And if you are one of those people then you can give it a try. Also, the best part is that for light usage, you don’t have to sign up for a free account.
