getFavicon

Retrieves the relevant favicon for a URL, or returns a default icon should it not be able to find it. Works better than the Google version as it will find favicons specified by an HTML page's <link> element. Feel free to hotlink, although it would be nice if you could email me if you're going to make more than a couple of requests a second.

Instructions

To retrieve a favicon you can hotlink it at...

http://getfavicon.appspot.com/[URL]

Notice the URL contains the protocol (http or https). For example...

http://getfavicon.appspot.com/http://www.google.com

This works well in an <img> tag...

<img src="http://getfavicon.appspot.com/http://www.google.com" alt="Google" width="16" height="16" />

URL Generator

Full URL (e.g. http://www.google.com):

Examples

• Google Code
• Twitter (retrieved over HTTPS)
• Author's site
• Python Docs (delivered using HTTPS)
• Getting it's own icon - before some wiseguy suggests it

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Stats

Updated every minute

Icons served

15.4 million

Cache hit rate

93.37%

Unable to find favicon

16.35%

Implementations

• Google Reader Favicon ++ (Greasemonkey script)
• James Dempster
• Jason Cartwright
• getURLinfo
• play.tm

Known problems

• Sometimes doesn't get the correct favicon when there are multiple favicons per domain
• Some dodgy redirect handling when retrieving icon
• Sometimes returns incorrect MIME type
• Client-side caching is rubbish
• Some dicey error handling

Credit

By Jason Cartwright

Built using

• Google App Engine
• Beautiful Soup