Hacker News Keyword Monitor

Monitor Hacker News for keywords, brands, domains, or authors using the official public Algolia Hacker News Search API (https://hn.algolia.com/api). No API key, no login. One clean dataset record per matching item, with a stable set of normalized columns plus the complete raw hit so nothing is lost.

Perfect for brand / product / competitor monitoring, lead discovery, or tracking every time a domain gets submitted or discussed on HN.

Typical job: "tell me every Hacker News story that mentions my brand (or a competitor, or my domain) since last week" — one row per post with title, points, comments, author, date and the HN link.

Quick start (about a minute)

1. Click Try for free.
2. The input form opens with this job already filled in (replace apify with your brand, product or domain):

{
  "queries": ["apify"],
  "tags": "story",
  "minPoints": 5,
  "sortByDate": true,
  "maxItemsPerQuery": 5
}

3. Click Start. It returns up to 5 of the newest stories with 5+ points.
4. The starter has no date cutoff, so older matches can appear. For weekly monitoring, raise maxItemsPerQuery, add sinceDaysAgo: 7, and schedule the run weekly. Use "tags": "comment" to catch mentions inside comment threads.

Output preview (real rows)

From a local run of the input above on 2026-09-24 (first 3 of 5 rows, selected columns):

title	author	points	numComments	createdAt	hnUrl
Show HN: TopicRadar – Track trending topics across HN, GitHub, ArXiv, and more	MickolasJae	36	12	2026-01-20T14:47:50Z	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46692347
Show HN: mcpc – Universal command-line client for Model Context Protocol (MCP)	jancurn	50	5	2026-01-06T15:05:09Z	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46513163
'How to do great work' by Paul Graham mapped out	vkdelta	6	0	2026-01-04T20:03:12Z	https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46491627

A match can come from the story URL or text, not only the title (row 3 matched its link). Points and comment counts are whatever HN showed at run time.

Cost

$0.0005 per item returned on the free tier (lower on paid Apify plans), so the quick start costs at most $0.0025 and 1,000 items cost about $0.50. A query with no matches returns 0 rows and costs nothing for items.

What it does

Give it one or more queries and pick an item type; the actor searches each query independently and returns the matching items:

Input	What it does	Example
queries	terms to monitor (matched on title, text, comment body & URL)	your-brand, kubernetes, stripe.com
tags	item type: story / comment / show_hn / ask_hn / poll	story
minPoints	only items with ≥ this many points (story types only)	50
minComments	only stories with ≥ this many comments	20
sinceDaysAgo	only items from the last N days	7
sortByDate	newest-first (on) vs HN relevance (off)	true
maxItemsPerQuery	cap per query (auto-paginates)	200

Because a query is matched against the submitted URL too, searching a domain like github.com/apache/airflow surfaces every HN submission of that link.

Leave a single empty query to browse the newest items of the chosen type without a keyword.

Output

One dataset record per item, normalized onto one schema:

itemId, type, title, url, author, points, numComments, createdAt, createdAtTimestamp, matchedQuery, text (post text or comment body), storyId, storyTitle, storyUrl, parentId, hnUrl (the news.ycombinator.com/item?id=… permalink), tags

…plus raw — the complete, untouched Algolia hit — so any field not surfaced above (e.g. _highlightResult, children) is still available.

Example input

{
  "queries": ["apify", "web scraping"],
  "tags": "story",
  "minPoints": 10,
  "sinceDaysAgo": 30,
  "sortByDate": true,
  "maxItemsPerQuery": 200
}

A query that matches nothing returns 0 records and succeeds (never an error).

Notes & limits

• The Algolia HN index lets you page through the first 1000 hits of any single query. To reach older items, narrow with sinceDaysAgo, a higher minPoints, or a more specific query.
• Comments have no point or comment-count score on Hacker News, so minPoints / minComments are ignored when searching comments.
• points / num_comments server-side filtering is only available on the newest-first index; the actor applies these filters correctly regardless of the sortByDate setting.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: $0.0005 per item returned on the free tier, with volume discounts on paid plans (down to $0.00025). No start fee.

Source

Data comes from the official Hacker News Search API powered by Algolia (https://hn.algolia.com/api). Hacker News is a service of Y Combinator. This actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Y Combinator or Algolia.