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Linking to a Title or Person Entry

To link to the main page of a person or title entry in our database you can just cut and paste the URL you see at the top of your browser when you look them up.

An example might be: if you wanted to link to Mad Max, you could look it up and you'd see the URL was...

Note the final / at the end of the URL; if you leave it off we'll redirect browsers to the correct link, but this will introduce a delay in getting to the actual information.

Perhaps after linking to Mad Max, you wanted to link to Mel Gibson. Here's the URL:

When linking to the IMDb, we ask that you let your users know that the link leads to us. For example, if your page was about Tom Cruise, you might say "Find out more about Tom Cruise on IMDb." If you're going to include a number of links to people and/or movies within the body of an article or text where noting us on every link is overkill, please add something like the following somewhere on the page:

Filmography links and data courtesy of IMDb.

Here is the HTML code for this attribution:

Deep Linking to Specific Information

Another thing to note is that you don't just have to link to the main page of a movie or title. We break up our data into separate categories, so if you're referring to a piece of trivia about say, North by Northwest, you can go to its trivia page and copy that URL from your browser to use instead:

North by Northwest main page link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053125/

North by Northwest trivia page link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053125/trivia

A note about "old" URLs

IMDb URLs for people used to contain the text of their names (the same was also true for titles a long time ago), but we have moved to a scheme where the URLs for both people and movies contain a unique and permanent identifier. There are a number of reasons we did this:

1. Consistency: URLs for names and titles are now all exactly the same length and structure. This simplifies our website software, making us able to serve pages that are smaller and that load quicker. This is also the URL scheme we use on IMDb Pro.
2. Permanency: People sometimes change their names due to marriage or for other reasons. IMDb also does a considerable amount of name manipulation behind the scenes to assure authority and consistency. With the new scheme, the URL for a person will remain the same regardless of any changes to their name. The same is true for movies, which can change titles several times before release, or be known by different titles in different countries.
3. Portability: Most titles and names contain spaces; many also contain exotic letters -- all of which need special encoding to appear in URLs. Different browsers and e-mail systems also handle the encodings differently, which has in the past led to broken links or mangled URLs. A good example of this is Hólmfríður Þórhallsdóttir, who appeared in the 1981 Icelandic film Óðal feðranna. URLs constructed from these kinds of names and titles often break when passed through different pieces of software. It's also much easier to verbally communicate our new URLs than our old ones.