Brand Mention Monitor — Hacker News + Google News

Know when the internet talks about you. This actor sweeps Hacker News (stories and comments) and Google News for your keywords and outputs clean, deduplicated mention records — built to run on a schedule as a free-tier replacement for Mention, Brand24, or Google Alerts (which famously misses most of HN).

Why this one

• Keyless — no API keys, no OAuth, nothing to configure but your keywords.
• Dedupes across runs — it remembers what it already reported, so a daily schedule yields only new mentions. No more re-reading the same thread.
• HN comments included — most brand chatter on HN happens in comment threads, not story titles. Tools that only search titles miss it.
• Automation-ready output — pipe the dataset into Slack, email, Telegram, a Google Sheet, or your own triage workflow via Apify integrations.

Input

{
  "keywords": ["Acme Corp", "acme.dev", "Jane Doe"],
  "sources": ["hackernews", "googlenews"],
  "lookbackHours": 24
}

Track competitors too — mentions are tagged with the keyword that matched, so one run can watch your whole market.

Output (one dataset item per mention)

{
  "source": "hackernews",
  "kind": "comment",
  "keyword": "acme.dev",
  "title": "We switched from Acme to self-hosting and cut costs 80%...",
  "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234567",
  "externalUrl": null,
  "author": "throwaway2026",
  "points": null,
  "numComments": null,
  "publishedAt": "2026-07-05T14:03:11.000Z"
}

Recommended setup

1. Create a Schedule in Apify: daily at your morning time, with lookbackHours: 25 (small overlap; dedup removes the seam).
2. Add an integration on the actor: Slack message, email, or webhook per run with new items.
3. Add your competitors' names as keywords — the keyword field tells you who each mention is about.

FAQ

Which sources exactly? Hacker News via the official Algolia search API (stories + comments), Google News via its public RSS feed (respects your language/country settings).

Does it dedupe between HN and Google News? URLs are normalized (tracking params stripped) and deduped globally per run and across runs.

Rate limits? Both sources are polite-use public endpoints; the default 50 items/keyword/source keeps you well inside them.