Reverse engineering UDisc's API - Part 2, Search

Published May 29, 2025

2 min read

First part of the series, Courses, can be found here: Courses

Search for Places

In the first post in this series, we were able to parse and extract a list of Course data. This is great, but we're simply getting back 20 random courses that might not mean anything to the end user. Lucky for us, there are a couple search options.

Going to https://udisc.com/courses and starting to type in the search box reveals some network calls:

/places/search?term=charlotte&limit=5

This is getting called for every character that is typed and should probably be debounced a little.

Anyway, from that call, we get some pretty well formed data instead of the index/schema map data like before. Here is one result:

{
"_id": "NxHZZBpPjDnXHbbZg",
"type": "city",
"slug": "charlotte-nc",
"name": "Charlotte",
"country": "United States",
"countryCode": "US",
"admin1": "North Carolina",
"city": "Charlotte",
"location": [
  -80.84313,
  35.22709
],
"score": 98.75883083083083,
"fullLocationText": "Charlotte North Carolina United States",
"highlights": [
  {
    "score": 1.4719792604446411,
    "path": "fullLocationText",
    "texts": [
      {
        "value": "Charlotte North Carolina",
        "type": "hit"
      },
      {
        "value": " United States",
        "type": "text"
      }
    ]
  }
],
"autocompleteScore": 72.5995921895284
},

There seem to be a few options for type.

city
admin1 (which appears to represent state in the US)
country

Now, you can take that slug and plug it into the courses call:

/courses.data?placeId=charlotte-nc

See the first post on how to parse and extract that data.

Search for Courses

The Places endpoint was not the only one being hit though. When typing in the search box, you will also see this: /api/courses/search?includeGenerallyUnavailableCourses=true&term=hornets nest&limit=5

Again, we get some pretty well formed data:

{
"_id": "jJAW46X3WX8qT7mXR",
"locationText": "Charlotte, VT",
"ratingAverage": 3.4976632020706235,
"courseId": 11220,
"ratingCount": 239,
"name": "Charlotte Beach",
"shortId": "j04j",
"highlights": [
  {
    "score": 2.771970748901367,
    "path": "name",
    "texts": [
      {
        "value": "Charlotte",
        "type": "hit"
      },
      {
        "value": " Beach",
        "type": "text"
      }
    ]
  }
],
"searchScore": 11.487470626831055,
"autocompleteScore": 11.66234797214058
},

Next time I will show you how to take that data and get a specific Course endpoint and data.

Another Way to Fuzzy Find Courses

Not exactly a search but there appears to be at least one more way of fuzzy finding courses. The courses.data endpoint can take another param called courseTerm. The full URL would be:

/courses.data?courseTerm=charlotte

This will return course results with "Charlotte" in the name. I'm thinking this endpoint is there for list type pages and the search endpoint might just be for autocomplete drop downs.

Summary

Showed how to search for places and courses

Plan for Next Time

Drill down into specific course data

Disclaimer

The data accessed in this post is publicly available via standard browser network requests and does not require login, tokens, or circumvention of protections.

It it accessed as fair use and for educational purposes.