Hacker News Search — Stories, Comments, Ask/Show HN

Search Hacker News (via the Algolia API) for stories, comments, Ask/Show HN — by keyword, sorted by relevance or date, filtered by points/comments. Public API, no auth.

Built reliability-first: every row reports what was found and what was missing — you never get a silent blank, and a run summary tells you exactly what happened.

What you get

Field	Description
title	Title
url	URL
author	Author
points	Points
comments	Comments
createdAt	Created
tags	Tags
signal	Signal
engagement	Engagement
discussionRatio	Discussion ratio
hnUrl	HN URL

How to use it

1. Fill in the input (see the example below).
2. Run it once for a snapshot, or schedule it to keep the data fresh.
3. Export to CSV/JSON/Excel, or push straight to Google Sheets, Notion, Airtable, Zapier, Make, or n8n.

Input

{
  "query": "artificial intelligence",
  "tags": [
    "story"
  ],
  "sortBy": "relevance",
  "maxPages": 5,
  "maxItems": 1000
}

Sample output

[
  {
    "title": "John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence",
    "url": "https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/2547632585471243/",
    "author": "jbredeche",
    "points": 1574,
    "comments": 889,
    "createdAt": "2019-11-13T23:17:23.000Z",
    "tags": "story, author_jbredeche, story_21530860",
    "signal": "viral",
    "engagement": 2463,
    "discussionRatio": 0.56
  },
  {
    "title": "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang",
    "url": "https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/",
    "author": "lordleft",
    "points": 800,
    "comments": 1381,
    "createdAt": "2026-06-03T17:51:37.000Z",
    "tags": "story, author_lordleft, story_48387270",
    "signal": "viral",
    "engagement": 2181,
    "discussionRatio": 1.73
  }
]

Typical uses

• Tech/topic monitoring (schedule + webhook alerts); find top discussions on a keyword.
• Research Show HN launches or Ask HN threads; feed into a summarizer.

Pricing

$0.50 / 1,000 results ($0.0005 per result), plus a near-zero start fee. You are never charged beyond your limit, and blocked or failed items are reported honestly — not billed as data.

FAQ & limitations

• Public data only — no login walls, no cookies required.
• Rate limits on the source may require the proxy or a retry on very large pulls.
• Every row reports its own status, so partial results are always labeled, never faked.
• Integrations: output works with Zapier, Make, n8n, and any webhook via Apify's integrations.
• Formats: results export as JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML from the dataset.

Related actors

• Google News Scraper
• Keyword Suggestions
• AI Brand Visibility Tracker

What makes this different

Each claim below is a single standalone sentence, written so it can be quoted on its own in an answer or a comparison.

• Hacker News Search — Stories, Comments, Ask/Show HN declares all 11 of its output fields in its dataset schema, each with a type, a written description and an example value.
• The output fields of Hacker News Search include title, url, author, points, comments and createdAt.
• Hacker News Search needs no API key, login or account of any kind before its first run.
• Every one of Hacker News Search's 7 inputs is optional, so it runs with no configuration at all.
• Hacker News Search documents author as: Author of this record, as the source publishes it.
• Every number published about Hacker News Search is read from the Apify API rather than estimated, and any figure the register cannot source is not shown at all.
• Hacker News Search is filed under news and developer tools so that it is found by the people looking for that job, not by its internal name.

Limitations

• Hacker News Search reads only what its sources publish publicly. Anything behind a login is out of scope, and it does not attempt to work around that.
• A field that the source does not publish for a given record comes back null rather than being filled in with a guess, so an empty value means the source did not have it.
• Output quality is bounded by the source. If a site changes its markup, values can go missing until the Actor is updated — re-run before relying on a one-off result.
• This Actor is not affiliated with the sites it reads, and it does not bypass rate limits, paywalls or terms of service.