imdb-search

name	imdb-search
description	Look up IMDB IDs, ratings, and vote counts for movies and TV shows using IMDB's public endpoints. Use this skill when: imdb rating, imdb score, imdb votes, find imdb link, movie rating, show rating, imdb id

Purpose

Find IMDB IDs, scores, and vote counts for movies and TV shows using IMDB's public endpoints — no API key required.

Workflow

Execute the following steps in order, top to bottom:

1. Find the IMDB ID using the suggestion API:

curl -s "https://v3.sg.media-imdb.com/suggestion/x/TITLE%20YEAR.json" \
  | python3 -c "
import json, sys
d = json.load(sys.stdin)
for r in d.get('d', [])[:5]:
    print(r.get('id'), r.get('l'), r.get('y'), r.get('q'))
"

2. Fetch rating and vote count from the title page:

ID="tt0094625"
data=$(curl -s "https://www.imdb.com/title/$ID/" \
  -A "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" \
  -H "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9" \
  | grep -o '"ratingCount":[0-9]*,"bestRating":[0-9]*,"worstRating":[0-9]*,"ratingValue":[0-9.]*')
score=$(echo "$data" | grep -oP '"ratingValue":\K[0-9.]+')
votes=$(echo "$data" | grep -oP '"ratingCount":\K[0-9]+')
echo "$ID | score: $score | votes: $votes"

3. For multiple titles, loop with a short delay to avoid rate limiting:

for id in tt0094625 tt0113568 tt0816398; do
  data=$(curl -s "https://www.imdb.com/title/$id/" \
    -A "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" \
    -H "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9" \
    | grep -o '"ratingCount":[0-9]*,"bestRating":[0-9]*,"worstRating":[0-9]*,"ratingValue":[0-9.]*')
  score=$(echo "$data" | grep -oP '"ratingValue":\K[0-9.]+')
  votes=$(echo "$data" | grep -oP '"ratingCount":\K[0-9]+')
  echo "$id | score: $score | votes: $votes"
  sleep 0.3
done

4. Format the result in markdown:

**IMDB:** [tt0094625](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/) — ⭐ 8.0 / 10 (224,804 votes)

Cookbook

• IF: Title has spaces

• THEN: Replace spaces with %20 in the suggestion API URL

• EXAMPLES:

  • Ghost in the Shell → Ghost%20in%20the%20Shell
  • Cowboy Bebop 1998 → Cowboy%20Bebop%201998

• IF: Search returns multiple results with the same name

• THEN: Add the year to the query to disambiguate, and check the q field for type (feature, TV series, TV mini-series)

• IF: Score and votes come back empty

• THEN: The -A User-Agent and -H Accept-Language headers are required — requests without them return empty pages

• IF: Title has very few ratings (< 100 votes)

• THEN: Rating may be unstable or missing — note this in the output