How do I get the most popular tags?

Question

How do I get the most popular tags from Instagram API? I searched the API, but didn't find a way to retrieve this data. This website gets it, but how?

Answer 1

The question is old, but for others also struggling the same problem, as Sebastien mentioned there is no such query. However I have been recently needing same functionality and came down idea that small traversal pretty much solves the problem.

Instagram doesn't respond you a list of tags starting with just one letter. Example:

• https://api.instagram.com/v1/tags/search?q=a

This URL returns just one element, which is "a". However if you send a request containing two characters like

• https://api.instagram.com/v1/tags/search?q=aa

then you'll end up with the most popular tags starting on "aa"

Afterwards you can simply traverse your desired alphabet in O(N^2) time and by joining responses you'll end up with a list of most popular tags.

Length in case of English(Latin) alphabet would be 26^2 = 676 Though you shouldn't probably try getting any more tags as the limit is still 5,000 requests and 26^3 would go for 17576.

foreach(character in 'a'...'
{
   foreach(character in 'a'...'z')
   {
       Send hashtag request 'aa'...'az'...'zz'
       Get json and merge with previous array
   }
}

Sort final array by [media_count]

Alternate approach would be to parse some huge dictionary (wikipedia dump for example) and sort out top 5000 most common prefixes and try querying them.