Stack Exchange Question & Tag Tracker

Track trending questions, tag popularity, and full-text search results across Stack Overflow and 170+ Stack Exchange network sites (Server Fault, Super User, Ask Ubuntu, Math, Physics, and more).

Use this Actor to monitor developer trends, measure technology popularity, research technical topics, or build datasets for tech landscape analysis.

---

Features

• 3 modes: questions by tag, popular/matching tags, full-text keyword search
• 5 sort options: hot (trending now), week, month, top voted, recent activity
• Optional top answers: fetch the highest-voted answers for each question
• Pagination: automatically fetches multiple pages until your maxResults limit
• Backoff-aware: respects SE API throttling signals (backoff_seconds)
• No API key required — works out of the box (300 req/day free; 10,000/day with a free API key)

---

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	questions	questions, tags, or search
site	string	stackoverflow	SE site slug (e.g. serverfault, superuser, askubuntu)
tags	array	[]	Tags to filter by in questions mode (AND logic)
searchQuery	string	""	Full-text query for search mode
tagQuery	string	""	Partial tag name filter for tags mode
sortBy	string	week	activity, votes, hot, week, month, creation
maxResults	integer	50	Max items to return (1–500)
includeAnswers	boolean	false	Fetch top answers per question (uses extra quota)
maxAnswersPerQuestion	integer	3	How many top answers to include (1–10)
apiKey	string	""	Optional SE API key for 10,000 req/day quota

Example: Trending Python questions this week

{
  "mode": "questions",
  "site": "stackoverflow",
  "tags": ["python"],
  "sortBy": "week",
  "maxResults": 100,
  "includeAnswers": false
}

Example: Hot questions across sites

{
  "mode": "questions",
  "site": "stackoverflow",
  "tags": [],
  "sortBy": "hot",
  "maxResults": 50
}

Example: Search for LLM-related questions with answers

{
  "mode": "search",
  "site": "stackoverflow",
  "searchQuery": "LLM fine-tuning memory error",
  "sortBy": "votes",
  "maxResults": 30,
  "includeAnswers": true,
  "maxAnswersPerQuestion": 3
}

Example: Most popular tags on Ask Ubuntu

{
  "mode": "tags",
  "site": "askubuntu",
  "tagQuery": "network",
  "maxResults": 50
}

---

Output

Each record in the dataset represents one question (questions/search mode) or tag (tags mode).

Question record

{
  "question_id": 75941432,
  "title": "How to use asyncio.gather with error handling?",
  "body_preview": "I have a list of coroutines and want to run them concurrently…",
  "tags": ["python", "asyncio"],
  "score": 87,
  "view_count": 12543,
  "answer_count": 4,
  "is_answered": true,
  "accepted_answer_id": 75941899,
  "owner_name": "dev_user",
  "owner_reputation": 3200,
  "created_at": "2023-04-01T14:22:00+00:00",
  "last_activity_at": "2024-01-15T09:10:00+00:00",
  "link": "https://stackoverflow.com/q/75941432",
  "site": "stackoverflow",
  "top_answers": [
    {
      "answer_id": 75941899,
      "score": 112,
      "is_accepted": true,
      "body_preview": "Use return_exceptions=True to prevent one failure from…"
    }
  ]
}

Tag record

{
  "name": "python",
  "count": 2184321,
  "is_required": false,
  "is_moderator_only": false,
  "has_synonyms": true,
  "site": "stackoverflow"
}

---

Pricing

Event	Price
Actor start	$0.005 (once)
Per question fetched	$0.002

Fetching 100 questions costs ~$0.205. Tags mode charges only the actor-start fee.

---

API Quota & Rate Limits

Stack Exchange allows 300 requests/day without authentication and 10,000 requests/day with a free API key.

Each page fetch counts as 1 request. With includeAnswers=true, each question adds 1 more request.

Register a free key at stackapps.com.

---

Supported Sites

Any site in the Stack Exchange network works as the site parameter:

Slug	Site
stackoverflow	Stack Overflow
serverfault	Server Fault
superuser	Super User
askubuntu	Ask Ubuntu
math	Mathematics
physics	Physics
unix	Unix & Linux
gamedev	Game Development
datascience	Data Science
ai	Artificial Intelligence

See the full list at stackexchange.com/sites.

---

Use Cases

• Tech trend monitoring — track which tags and questions are trending weekly
• Competitor/library research — find pain points developers have with specific tools
• Content strategy — discover unanswered or highly-viewed questions for blog topics
• Dataset building — create labeled Q&A datasets for ML training
• Community health metrics — measure activity and engagement on SE communities

---

Technical Details

• Python 3.12, httpx async HTTP client
• asyncio.Semaphore(3) for polite concurrency
• Automatic pagination via has_more response field
• Exponential backoff on transient failures (up to 3 retries)
• Body HTML stripped to plain text preview (first 500 chars)

---

Related actors

• Hacker News Scraper — HN tech discussions alongside Stack Exchange Q&A for developer community insights
• GitHub Issues Tracker — GitHub issue tracking to complement Stack Overflow question trends
• Semantic Scholar Papers — Academic papers behind the technical questions trending on Stack Exchange

Feedback

If this actor powers your developer community research, a review helps others find it: Leave a review on Apify Store