All notable changes to Google News Scraper are recorded here. The newest release is first.
- New: Search terms (bulk) (
queries). Paste any number of keywords; one Google News search each, no cap on the number of terms, duplicates removed. A term with no results gives one free not_found row. maxItems is the total across all terms.
- New: Watch mode (
onlyNew) with monitorStoreName. A scheduled run returns only articles no earlier watch run returned; already-seen articles are skipped and never charged. A feed with nothing new gives one free not_found row and the run succeeds. Seen article ids (guid) are kept in a named key-value store on your own account.
- Unchanged: with both options left at their defaults, input, output and price are exactly as before.
- New: Include article text (
includeArticleText, off by default). Each article is opened on the publisher's site and the row gains articleText (readability-style main text), wordCount, topImage, canonicalUrl, articleTitle, articleUrl, siteName, articleLanguage, a filled publisherUrl, and articleStatus/articleError. Billed as a new article event only when the text was extracted; paywalled, blocked, missing and text-less pages are free. Contact details and author lines are removed from the text; social and video items are never opened.
- New filters:
dateFrom/dateTo (absolute or relative dates), excludeTerms, sites and excludeSites. Filtered-out rows are never saved or charged; for a Search query the filters are also sent to Google News as after:, before:, site: and -term operators.
- Unchanged: with the new options left empty, input, output and price are exactly as before.
- Docs: related Actors listed; input field descriptions clarified for AI agents.
- A search with no matches now finishes successfully (with a free
not_found row) instead of being marked failed; a run still fails when the source could not be read.
- Fixed: A run given only
query or topic returned the built-in "artificial intelligence" example instead, because the platform fills in the default startUrls. A keyword or topic now runs on its own; Start URLs you set yourself are used as before.
Listing and settings update. The price list is unchanged.
- The free-plan note now states that the free Apify plan's $5 of monthly credit covers about 3,350 articles in a single run.
- The search-engine description now begins "Google News API alternative" and no longer calls the Actor free.
- Default run memory is now 1 GB, matching the pricing section, so a run started without a memory setting is charged one start event.
First public release.
- Search and extraction implemented against the source's own public endpoints, with no login and no third-party API key.
- Every row carries
status, so a missing record (not_found) and a failure (error) are told apart from real data. Only ok rows are charged.
- Records are validated against a schema before they are written, so an upstream change produces loud warnings instead of silently billing for empty rows.
- Callable with no arguments by an AI agent, which the input schema's defaults make safe.
- Golden tests run the extraction against saved real responses, and the Actor is verified on Apify's own infrastructure before each release.