Find the relevant xkcd

Unofficial fan-made search, not affiliated with xkcd

Search API

Find xkcd comics from a description of a situation, from your own bot, editor plugin or script. It’s free, needs no key and allows requests from any website.

Please link to the comic on xkcd.com wherever you show a result (use the url field). This search exists to send people to Randall Munroe’s work.

Search

GET https://findxkcd.infopanel.org/api/search?q=<text>&limit=<1–20>
q
The situation, in plain words. Required, at most 500 characters. A comic number (327, #327, xkcd 327) or an exact title returns that comic first.
limit
How many comics to return, 1 to 20. Default 5.
curl 'https://findxkcd.infopanel.org/api/search?q=too+many+competing+standards&limit=1'
{
  "query": "too many competing standards",
  "results": [
    {
      "num": 927,
      "title": "Standards",
      "url": "https://xkcd.com/927/",
      "explain_url": "https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/927",
      "alt": "Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.",
      "img": "https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png",
      "published": "2011-07-20",
      "score": 0.83
    }
  ]
}

Results come best match first. score is the similarity between your text and the comic, from 0 to 1 (1 for a number or exact-title match). Weak matches are left out, so a query can return fewer results than limit, or none. alt is the comic’s title text from xkcd.com.

One comic

GET https://findxkcd.infopanel.org/api/comic/<num>

Returns the same fields as a search result, without score, or 404 if there is no such comic.

Limits and errors