Hacker News Search Scraper — find stories and comments by keyword, date and points

Search Hacker News for any word or phrase and get the stories and comments as a clean table: title, link, site, author, points, number of comments, date, the full text and the Hacker News link. Filter by type (stories, comments, Ask HN, Show HN), by date range and by minimum points. Export to CSV, JSON, Excel or Google Sheets. It reads Hacker News through its open search service, so it is fast and stable.

Who uses this: founders checking what people say about their product or a competitor, marketers and PR teams watching mentions, developer relations teams, investors and analysts spotting trends, researchers who need discussion data, AI agents that need current opinions on a topic.

What you get per result

Field	What it is
id, hnUrl	The item's ID and its Hacker News link
type	story, show_hn, ask_hn, comment or poll
title, url, domain	Title of the story, the link it points to, and that link's site (empty for comments and text posts)
author	The Hacker News username
points, numComments	Points, and number of comments on a story
createdAt	When it was posted (ISO time, UTC)
text	The text of the post or comment, cleaned from HTML
storyId, storyTitle, parentId	For a comment: the story it belongs to and the item it answers
query	Which of your search texts found it
scrapedAt	When the row was collected

Price

$0.01 per run + $1 per 1,000 results. That is two pay-per-event charges: actor-start ($0.01) once per run and result ($0.001) per story or comment. No compute fees on top. The free Apify plan ($5 per month credit) covers about 4,900 results a month at no cost. A run that the search service blocks before it returns any data is not charged.

How to use

1. Open the Input tab and type your search texts, one per line, for example web scraping or YC W26.
2. Pick the Type, and optionally a date range and a minimum of points. Set Max results per search. This is also your cost cap.
3. Click Start. When it is done, open the Output tab and export the table as CSV, JSON or Excel, or send it to Google Sheets with Apify's Google Sheets integration.

Input examples

Newest Show HN posts about scraping, with at least 10 points:

{ "queries": ["scraping"], "type": "show_hn", "minPoints": 10, "maxResults": 100 }

Every comment that mentions your product this month:

{
    "queries": ["apify", "crawlee"],
    "type": "comment",
    "dateFrom": "2026-09-01",
    "dateTo": "2026-09-30",
    "maxResults": 500
}

The best-matching stories about a topic:

{ "queries": ["vector database"], "type": "story", "sort": "relevance", "maxResults": 50 }

Output example

{
    "id": "49320034",
    "type": "show_hn",
    "title": "Show HN: PageSieve, a web scraping browser extension",
    "url": null,
    "domain": null,
    "author": "kajm",
    "points": 17,
    "numComments": 1,
    "createdAt": "2026-08-16T13:45:27Z",
    "text": "PageSieve[1] is a browser extension for scraping data from different websites from within your browser. Currently it's  Firefox only but I am open to porting it to other browsers ...",
    "storyId": "49320034",
    "storyTitle": "Show HN: PageSieve, a web scraping browser extension",
    "parentId": null,
    "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49320034",
    "query": "web scraping",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-09-26T10:00:00.000Z"
}

The text is shortened in this example.

Limits

• Hacker News search returns at most 1,000 results for one search text. Use a date range or a higher minimum of points to reach more, or split the search into smaller periods.
• Public data only: everything on Hacker News is public.
• Search matches words in the title, the text and the link. It is not an exact-phrase search unless you put the phrase in quotes.
• When several items share the exact same second, the search service can repeat one across pages. The actor removes such repeats, so you are not charged twice, and a very rare item can be missing.

FAQ

Can I watch mentions every day? Yes. Schedule the actor in Apify with sort set to date, a dateFrom of yesterday, and compare id values between runs.

Can I search comments only? Yes. Set Type to Comments.

Can an AI agent use it? Yes. It works through Apify's API and MCP server. Give it search texts and a maxResults limit.

Something is wrong. What now? Open an issue on the Issues tab with the search and the input you used. Field requests are welcome.

Changelog

• 0.1 First release: search by keyword, type, date and points; cleaned text; pay per event.