How to get a ticker symbol from a company name with the Google Finance API?

Question

This matter (getting a symbol form a company name) has already been solved in the following thread with Yahoo's API and I found the first and third answers quite useful. I also noticed that the second answer dealt with Google Finance but it uses ticker symbols and not the company name ...

Unfortunately, I learnt that Yahoo sometimes uses different ticker symbols from the stock exchanges.

So I would like to do the same thing — that is, I give a company name and I get its symbol — but with the Google Finance API, instead of Yahoo's.

Is that possible ? Thanks

Answer 1

Back when Google Finance first provided a Google Sheets formula, it was this:

=GoogleLookup(A1, "ticker")

But this no longer works, and Google has been dropping the ball on Finance for quite some time now. The REVERSE lookup is possible tho; ie, given the TICKER SYMBOL you can look up the official corporate name (according to GoogleFinance)...

=GOOGLEFINANCE(B1, "name")

Where A1 is the cell in Google Sheets with the corporate name, and B1 is the cell in GS w the ticker symbol.

Basically, you now need the ticker symbol to do anything with 'GOOGLEFINANCE'. 'LOOKUP' is still around but has been changed.

If you want ticker symbols, you have to write some API calls, and those solutions can be found elsewhere.