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Advanced title searching, filter by non-us certificates
The title above has the Norway: A recommended rating. If i try to filter for any certificate option on the left, the title is filtered out, because there is no filter for Norway A.
What i'm specifically interested in is to view just titles that have a certification in *any* country (filtering away those that don't have any certifications other than void, "Not Rated", "Not rated", "Unrated", "NR", "18TC", "TBC").
I wouldn't mind manually toggling on and off certifications for every country, but currently i don't even have that option.
ljdoncel
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20 days ago
Hi, AnataBakka:
You're right that you can't filter titles by ratings other than MPA's using the IMDb Advance Search default options. However, you can get some country-specific results by manually tweaking the URL generated by the search.
For instance, the following URL searches for all titles with an MPA “PG-13” rating, including adult titles (note the text in bold):
Well, if I want to find titles with a Norwegian “A” rating (NO:A in IMDb coding), I just have to change that part of the URL:
⚠️ Important: When searching for a certificate that contains the “+” symbol, such as United Kingdom's “14+”, you must replace the “+” with the code “%2B”:
You can also add more than one certificate by separating them with commas, keeping in mind that these commas before a certificate act as a logical OR in this case; in other words, the URL will return all titles that meet any of the criteria, that is, all titles that contains any of the certificates included in the query.
For instance, the following URL searches for all titles with a Norwegian rating of "A" or "12":
And those ratings don't even have to be from the same country. For example, to obtain movies with a Norwegian “A” rating or a Chilean “13+” rating or a Greek "K-12" rating (any of them):
On the other hand, if you add an exclamation mark before the certificate in the URL, you will exclude those titles from the search:
For example, the following URL returns all titles that are NOT rated “Tous publics” in France:
You can also combine multiple “excluded” certificates by separating them with commas, but keep in mind that, in this case, the commas before a certificate with an exclamation mark act as a logical AND; in other words, the URL will return all titles that meet all the criteria at the same time, that is, titles that do not include any of the certificates in the query.
For example, the following URL will display all titles that do not have French “Tous publics” or "12" certificates or a Spanish “16” certificate (none of the three):
Finally, you can create various combinations of included and excluded certificates, but keep in mind the rule regarding commas: when placed before a plain certificate, they function as a logical OR (union of sets), but when placed before an excluded certificate, they function as a logical AND (intersection of sets).
For example, the following URL will return all movies that have been rated “18” in Spain or “VM16” in Italy or "VM18" in Italy, and that have not been rated ‘16’ or “18” in France:
· in set notation: (ES:18 ∪ IT:VM16 ∪ IT:VM18) ∩ (not FR:16) ∩ (not FR:18) ·
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ljdoncel
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20 days ago
After the brief tutorial above on how to modify the URL to suit our needs, let’s get back to your original question:
Unfortunately, unless you have access to the extended contributor datasets (and know how to use them), there is no simple, straightforward way to obtain this information. Given that there are currently more than 1,150 different certificates in use on IMDb, it is impossible to construct a single query that includes all of them (actually, it is possible, but the system crashes when the query is executed), so the best strategy is to run queries for specific countries.
First of all, be careful not to make the following mistake. Someone might think that to retrieve titles with an MPA rating, but excluding those marked “Not rated” or “Unrated”, they could build the following URL:
This query has two problems:
Therefore, for each country, we have no choice but to generate a URL by concatenating all the certificates we care about with commas (logical ORs).
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ljdoncel
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20 days ago
I’m going to try to make things a little easier for you, so here’s a list of direct links to retrieve the titles with the "not void" country-specific certificates currently in use on IMDb (i.e. at least one item), along with a brief breakdown of the number of titles in each category (as of May 10, 2026, 2:08 p.m.).
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ljdoncel
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20 days ago
Cheers! 😊
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ljdoncel
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12 days ago
Hi, AnataBakka:
I don't know how it happened, but it's true. ➡️✅ fixed.
Correct. My syntax for importing the data into SPSS limited that variable to 30 characters and the full names of the certificates are "Germany:Freigegeben ohne Altersbeschränkung" (36 chars), "Spain:Over 18 years of age or over 14 years accompanied" (49 chars), "France:Tous publics avec avertissement" (31 chars) and "Germany:Infoprogramm gemäß § 14 JuSchG" (33 chars). ➡️✅ fixed.
I didn't include in the URLs certificates for which there were no instances in title.certificates.tsv, but now I remember that 4 years ago!! it was reported that information from video clips wasn't being exported correctly to the tsv files. The problem remains unresolved. And I see that two titles (videoclips) have that neglected rating. ➡️✅ fixed.
In this case, the colon seems to break the query and the system yields the results for “Indonesia:A”, "Indonesia:P" and "Indonesia:R" rather than "A:BO", "P:BO" and "R:BO" respectively. I tried escaping the colon with its code equivalent "%3A", but that doesn't work either. I can tell you that, as of today, none of the titles in title.certificates.tsv contain any of those three certificates; however, as I mentioned earlier, that doesn't mean a music video might not have one. ➡️❌ not fixed (not fixable?).
Some contributors have developed bots to automatically send large amounts of data in bulk. If the information is well-structured (as it appears to be based on the links you provided), it’s possible that some of them might be interested in participating in a project focused on ratings, but I can’t speak for them. I send my contributions patiently one by one...
IMDb needs to address those issues. There's nothing I can do on my end. I'm just a standard contributor.
If you find any other errors, please let me know.
Thank you very much again.
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