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Finding things

Search across the site, autosuggest, hot-search terms, the popular feeds, and the leaderboard.

When you do not already have an id, five commands help you find one: search, suggest, trending, popular, and rank. Their output flows straight into the resolving commands.

bili search lofi

search queries across types and emits one record per hit. The record adapts to what it found: a video hit looks like a video, a user hit like a user, and so on, so a mixed result still renders cleanly and pipes by URL:

bili search lofi -o url            # the URL of every hit
bili search lofi --type video      # restrict to one type
bili search lofi --type user

Restrict with --type to video, user, bangumi, film, live_room (which also answers to live), or article. Page through results with --page, and cap them with -n.

The natural next step is to resolve every hit to its full record:

bili search lofi -o url | bili video -

Search is one of the more aggressively rate-limited endpoints, so a fast loop can see a rate limit or a risk control refusal. bili retries the rate limit and never retries the refusal, because asking again four times is the worst possible answer to being turned away. Raise --rate and let the cache absorb repeats.

Worth knowing before you write a loop around it: this endpoint reports 1000 results and 50 pages for every query measured, including nonsense ones, so those counts are a constant and not an answer, and a search that genuinely matched nothing is not something the API can express.

bili suggest lof       # the terms bilibili would autocomplete
bili trending          # the current hot-search terms

These are the same lists the search box shows. trending is a quick read on what the site is talking about right now.

bili popular           # the popular (综合热门) feed
bili popular -n 20

popular reads the general popular feed. --weekly <n> reads a specific issue of the weekly selection (每周必看) instead, bilibili's curated weekly list.

The leaderboard

bili rank              # the overall leaderboard
bili rank --tid 129    # one category's leaderboard, 129 being dance

rank reads the 排行榜 leaderboard, optionally scoped to a single partition (category) by its numeric id. Each row is a video, so it pipes into video and crawl like any other list.

2 min read