How do I decide programmatically if to use a Topic API or a Search API for a given query?

You can use topic_getInfo to determine if the query you have is a topic in Daylife or not. If it is, you will get back information about the topic such as the topic_id. If your query is not a topic in Daylife, the API will return you an error code of -2008.

Topics are an ever-growing inventory in Daylife. There are currently following types of topics returned by the DayPIs:

*
* Person
* Place
* Organization
* Disease
* Drug
* Station
* Holiday

In case you have a query and you want to know if there are daylife topics matching your query, you can use search_getMatchingTopics. This API returns you all the daylife topics which have a name containing all the words in your query.