Google News Scraper & Media Coverage Intelligence

Track public Google News coverage for a topic, brand, or competitor. Start with one query and a seven-day window; use the article evidence to decide what merits a media or editorial response.

Problem → result → decision

Repeated manual news searches make source and recency comparisons slow. Give the Actor a topic and a result cap. It returns unique observed article rows, query summaries, OUTPUT, and REPORT.html. Use those observations to prioritize follow-up with journalists, publishers, or internal teams. It is not a complete media census.

Three use cases

1. Monitor visible public coverage of a brand or product.
2. Compare publisher diversity around a competitor topic.
3. Prepare a PR briefing from recent coverage and publication dates.

Quick Start (<30 seconds)

1. Replace the sample query with a topic, brand, or company.
2. Keep the seven-day window and 25-article cap for the first run.
3. Click Start; inspect the Articles Dataset view, OUTPUT, REPORT, and warnings.

{"queries":["artificial intelligence"],"timeRange":"7d","maxResultsPerQuery":25}

Full sample input: examples/INPUT.json. Advanced options include public News sections (an alternative to topics), fixed validated US/en-US locale settings, optional publisher URL resolution, and article order. Clear the sample query for a sections-only run.

Illustrative output row

{"record_type":"article","query":"artificial intelligence","search_position":1,"title":"Illustrative observed headline","source_name":"Example publisher","google_news_url":"https://news.google.com/articles/example","article_url":null,"url_resolved":false,"published_at":null}

This is a sanitized schema-shaped illustration, not an observed live article. Publisher URLs and dates can be unavailable. Query-summary rows, OUTPUT, and REPORT explain overlap, source diversity, freshness, and warnings.

Pricing

article-result: USD 0.0005 per unique valid article delivered. At that event rate, 100 / 1,000 / 10,000 articles cost USD 0.05 / 0.50 / 5.00 in event charges. Query summaries, duplicates, empty results, unresolved URL attempts, OUTPUT, and REPORT are not charged. This candidate does not change Cloud pricing.

Evidence and limits

The Cloud-validated 0.1.3 release delivered four article rows with Dataset, OUTPUT, and REPORT passing in its smoke. That is one observed run, not a reliability claim. US/en-US is the only validated locale. Google News may omit fields or change ranking, and publisher URL resolution is optional and not guaranteed.

Next step: Run one topic, review the article evidence, and increase the cap only if it supports a media decision. There is no same-suite cross-link to add in this five-Actor launch set.