📰 IOL News Scraper

Scrape the latest articles from IOL — one of Portugal's largest news portals — and turn them into clean, structured data for agents, RAG systems, dashboards, and media monitoring workflows.

Choose a category (News, Sport, Lifestyle, and more) and scrape up to 200 articles with titles, descriptions, full article text, dates, authors, tags, images, and section metadata. The actor paginates through category listing pages and extracts structured content from each article page.

💡 Perfect For

• 🤖 AI Agents: Give agents fresh Portuguese news context with direct url, content, and tags fields.
• 📚 RAG Pipelines: Index article text, summaries, metadata, and source URLs so assistants can answer questions about recent IOL coverage with citations.
• 📰 Media Monitoring: Track breaking news, sports, lifestyle, health, travel, and other topics across IOL sections.
• 📈 Trend Analysis: Compare publication dates, categories, sub-categories, and tags to spot recurring themes and coverage patterns.
• ⚙️ Automation Workflows: Feed new article metadata into Slack bots, Discord alerts, newsletters, spreadsheets, or internal agent workflows.

✨ Why This Actor Matters

AI agents and data pipelines need structured, machine-readable news — not raw HTML. IOL publishes a wide range of Portuguese content across many sections, but extracting consistent fields like full article text, publish dates, and tags from listing pages alone is unreliable.

This actor uses Playwright to browse category listings, collect article URLs, and extract normalized data from each article page — including JSON-LD metadata, Open Graph tags, and cleaned paragraph content.

📦 What's Inside The Data?

For every article, the actor returns:

• Core metadata: url, title, description, content
• Dates: published_date, modified_date
• Authorship: author_name, publisher
• Classification: category, sub_category, tags
• Media: image_url

🚀 Quick Start

1. Open the actor on Apify or run it locally.
2. Choose the category you want to scrape (default: News).
3. Set number_of_articles to how many articles you want, up to 200.
4. Start the actor and export the results as JSON, CSV, Excel, or through the Apify API.

🧑‍💻 Tech Details

Input Example:

{
  "category": "News",
  "number_of_articles": 100
}

The actor maps each category to its IOL listing URL and paginates through pages until enough article URLs are collected:

• News -> https://www.iol.pt/noticias
• Sport -> https://www.iol.pt/desporto
• All -> https://www.iol.pt/universo-iol (uses "ver mais" and ?pagina= pagination)
• Latest -> https://www.iol.pt/ultimas
• Most Viewed -> https://www.iol.pt/maisVistos
• Discoveries -> https://www.iol.pt/descobertas

Output Example:

{
  "url": "https://www.iol.pt/.../20260623/6a3a49fed34edcee7c6598c7",
  "title": "O terror dos ácaros e alérgenos: o aspirador de colchões com luz UV da Hoover caiu para os 73€ no Prime Day",
  "description": "Avaliado com nota excelente de 4,4 estrelas, este modelo leve é perfeito para limpar sofás, camas e até estofos do carro",
  "content": "Este artigo pode conter links afiliados*\n\nO Prime Day já arrancou e esta pode ser uma das melhores oportunidades...",
  "published_date": "2026-06-23T10:07:00.000+01:00",
  "modified_date": "2026-06-23T10:07:16.629+01:00",
  "author_name": "IOL",
  "publisher": "Notícias de hoje - IOL",
  "category": "All",
  "sub_category": "Descobertas",
  "image_url": "https://img.iol.pt/preset/68e510f0d34ee0c2fed0f8a1/og/iol",
  "tags": [
    "Hoover hmc5 aspirador colchões preço",
    "Aspirador com luz uv para ácaros",
    "Melhor aspirador para sofás e estofos"
  ]
}

Parameters:

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
category	string	No	IOL section to scrape: All, News, Sport, TV, Lifestyle, Celebrities, Health, Travel, Tips, Money, Recipes, Pets, Latest, Most Viewed, or Discoveries. Default: News.
number_of_articles	integer	No	Number of articles to collect from the listing. Min 1, max 200, default 100.