This document describes the NEWZNAB Usenet Searching Web API. The API is designed to be implemented by Usenet indexing sites, i.e. sites that index Usenet newsgroups through some means, typically by downloading and inspecting the NTTP headers. The API is aimed for NZB aware client applications to allow them to perform Usenet searches against Newznab servers and receive NZB information in order to facilitate direct downloading from Usenet without having to download any NTTP headers.

This document does not describe the actual implementation of either the client or the server but just describes the HTTP(S) interface and request/response sequences.

Intended readers are server and client implementers.

Notation

This document uses the following notations:

Parameters:

  • t=c denotes a required HTTP query parameter.
  • [o=json | o=xml] denotes optional parameters with possible values.