Hacker News Search and Mention Monitor

Search every Hacker News story and comment, or watch for new mentions of your company and get only what appeared since last time.

The 1,000 result ceiling, and how this gets past it

A Hacker News search returns at most 1,000 results. Measured 2026-08-30: hitsPerPage times nbPages is always exactly 1000, and asking for page ten at a hundred per page returns an empty list rather than an error. Anything built on plain paging stops at a thousand and looks like it finished.

When a window comes back full, this Actor halves the date range and searches both halves, repeating until the windows fit. The run summary reports windowsUsed per query so you can see when that happened.

The match count is an estimate, not a count

This one is worth knowing before you build anything on it. The same query returns a different total depending only on the page size:

hitsPerPage=20    6,689
hitsPerPage=50    5,942
hitsPerPage=100   6,455

Counting the same query exhaustively year by year gives 6,046, which matches none of them. It is stable for an identical request, so it looks trustworthy until you change something unrelated.

The field is called estimatedMatches here and carries matchCountIsApproximate, and the Actor never uses it to decide when to stop.

Watching for mentions

Turn on Only new since the last run and each run returns only what was not there before. The first run on a query records a baseline and returns everything with isNew empty, because nothing is new the first time you look. A query whose request fails keeps its previous list, so an outage cannot look like a change.

Nothing is ever reported as closed. An item leaving your date window is not an item being deleted, and pretending otherwise would put false disappearances in your history.

Output

title, author, points, comments, createdAt, url and discussionUrl.

url is the submitted link and is null on an Ask HN or a text post, which genuinely have none. discussionUrl is the thread itself and is always there, which is usually the one people actually want.

Comments come back with the title of the story they sit on, so a row is readable on its own.

Access

Free, no key, no login, and no rate limit found at eight requests in a row with no pacing.