The Better Google News Scraper — Fast, Affordable Google News RSS Scraper by Keyword, Language & Country

Scrape Google News at scale without a browser and without a proxy. The Better Google News Scraper turns any keyword or phrase into a clean, structured feed of news articles — extracting headlines, article links, publish dates, and source outlets straight from the public Google News RSS endpoint. Because it is HTTP-only (no headless browser, no residential proxy), it runs in seconds and burns very few compute units per run, making it one of the most affordable and efficient ways to monitor news, track brands, build media-monitoring dashboards, or feed a news dataset into your app.

Search Google News by keyword, language, and country/region, cap the number of results, and export to JSON, CSV, or Excel — or pull results straight from the Apify API.

What it extracts

For every matching news story, the actor returns:

• title — the article headline
• link — the article URL (Google News redirect link)
• pubDate — publish date/time as an ISO-8601 timestamp
• pubDateRaw — the original RFC-822 date string from the feed
• source — the publishing outlet's name (e.g. the newspaper or site)
• sourceUrl — the publisher's homepage, when present
• guid — the feed item's unique identifier
• snippet — a clean, plain-text summary with all HTML stripped

Features

• Keyword search with full support for Google News search operators (intitle:, when:7d, quoted phrases, AND/OR, etc.).
• Localized results — choose any language + country pair (e.g. en/US, de/DE, pt/BR).
• HTTP-only and proxy-free by default — no browser to boot, no proxy bill.
• Fast and lightweight — a single RSS request per run, parsed in-memory.
• Structured, deduped output ready for JSON, CSV, Excel, or the API.
• Configurable result cap with maxItems.
• Robust parsing — decodes HTML entities and normalizes messy descriptions into clean text.

Input

Configure the run in the Apify Console UI or via JSON. All fields:

Field	Type	Default	Description
query	string	—	Required. Keyword or phrase to search Google News for. Supports search operators, e.g. "climate policy", intitle:tesla, when:7d.
language	string	en	Two-letter ISO 639-1 language code, e.g. en, es, de, fr, pt.
country	string	US	Two-letter ISO 3166-1 country/region code, e.g. US, GB, DE, IN, BR.
maxItems	integer	100	Maximum number of news items to return.
proxyConfiguration	object	{ "useApifyProxy": false }	Optional. Not required — the feed is public. Set only if you specifically want to route requests through Apify Proxy.

Example input

{
  "query": "artificial intelligence",
  "language": "en",
  "country": "US",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Output

Each result is pushed to the dataset as a JSON object. Example:

[
  {
    "title": "OpenAI unveils a faster model & new tools - Reuters",
    "link": "https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiabc123",
    "pubDate": "2025-07-21T08:15:00.000Z",
    "pubDateRaw": "Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:15:00 GMT",
    "source": "Reuters",
    "sourceUrl": "https://www.reuters.com",
    "guid": "CBMiabc123",
    "snippet": "OpenAI unveils a faster model & new tools Reuters"
  },
  {
    "title": "AI policy update expected this week - The Associated Press",
    "link": "https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMighi789",
    "pubDate": "2025-07-19T14:05:00.000Z",
    "pubDateRaw": "Sat, 19 Jul 2025 14:05:00 GMT",
    "source": "The Associated Press",
    "sourceUrl": "https://apnews.com",
    "guid": "CBMighi789",
    "snippet": "AI policy update expected this week The Associated Press"
  }
]

You can export the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or RSS, or fetch it programmatically via the Apify API.

Example use cases

• Media monitoring & brand tracking — watch mentions of your company, product, or competitors across Google News.
• News aggregation — build a topic-based news feed or newsletter from fresh headlines.
• Market & financial research — track news around tickers, sectors, or commodities.
• PR & reputation management — get an early read on coverage and sentiment inputs.
• SEO & content research — discover trending stories and sources for a keyword.
• Academic & data science — assemble a news dataset for NLP, classification, or trend analysis.
• Alerting pipelines — schedule the actor and route new articles into Slack, email, or a database.

How it works

The actor builds a Google News RSS search URL from your query, language, and country:

https://news.google.com/rss/search?q={query}&hl={lang}-{COUNTRY}&gl={COUNTRY}&ceid={COUNTRY}:{lang}

It fetches that single feed over HTTP using Crawlee's CheerioCrawler, then hands the raw RSS/XML to a small, pure parser that extracts each <item>, decodes HTML entities, converts dates to ISO-8601, and strips markup from descriptions. Results are pushed to the dataset — no browser, no rendering, no proxy required.

Why it's efficient & affordable

• No headless browser. The actor never launches Chromium. It makes a plain HTTP request and parses text, which is dramatically lighter than rendering pages — so it uses fewer compute units per run.
• No residential proxy needed. The Google News RSS feed is public, so the default configuration sends requests directly. No proxy means no proxy cost.
• One request per run. A keyword search maps to a single RSS fetch, keeping runs quick and memory light.
• Lean parsing. The core parser is pure JavaScript with zero heavy dependencies, so cold starts and memory footprint stay small.

Together these keep runs cheap, fast, and predictable — ideal for frequent, scheduled monitoring.

FAQ

Do I need an API key or login to scrape Google News? No. This actor uses the public Google News RSS feed, so no key, account, or login is required.

Do I need a proxy to run the Google News scraper? No. The feed is public and the actor works proxy-free by default, which is a big part of why it's so affordable. You can optionally enable Apify Proxy if your own network requires it.

Can I search Google News in other languages and countries? Yes. Set the language (ISO 639-1) and country (ISO 3166-1) fields — for example de + DE for German news from Germany, or pt + BR for Brazilian Portuguese.

How many articles can it return per query? The Google News RSS feed returns up to roughly 100 recent items per search. Use maxItems to cap results, and vary your query (keywords, operators like when:7d) to widen or narrow coverage.

Can I schedule it to monitor news automatically? Yes. Use Apify Schedules to run it on any cadence and route fresh articles into your webhook, database, or notification channel.

Legal & ethical note

This actor collects publicly available news metadata from the Google News RSS feed. Please scrape responsibly: respect Google's Terms of Service and robots.txt, use reasonable request volumes, and comply with applicable laws (including copyright and data-protection rules) when storing or republishing content. Article headlines and links belong to their respective publishers — use the extracted data in line with those publishers' terms.