Stack Overflow Scraper — Question & Answer Data Extractor

Extract Stack Overflow questions, answers, comments, and user profile data using the official Stack Exchange API. This Actor is fast, reliable, and requires no browser rendering or proxy overhead — making it one of the most cost-effective ways to gather developer-focused data from the world's largest Q&A community.

Use Cases

• Developer research — Track trending topics, popular frameworks, and emerging technologies by analyzing question volume and tags over time.
• Content marketing — Identify high-traffic questions in your niche to create blog posts, tutorials, or documentation that answers real developer pain points.
• Competitive intelligence — Monitor how often competitors, libraries, or tools are mentioned in Stack Overflow discussions.
• Support automation — Build knowledge bases by extracting answered questions and their accepted solutions for internal documentation.
• Academic & NLP datasets — Collect structured Q&A pairs for training language models, sentiment analysis, or topic modeling research.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
searchQuery	String	Yes	Search term to find questions (e.g. javascript async await, python pandas dataframe)
tags	Array	No	Filter questions to only those matching all specified tags (e.g. ["python", "machine-learning"])
sort	String	No	Sort order: relevance, creation, votes, or activity (default: relevance)
maxItems	Integer	No	Maximum number of questions to extract, from 1 to 1000 (default: 100)
includeAnswers	Boolean	No	Whether to fetch top-voted answers for each extracted question (default: false)
maxAnswersPerQuestion	Integer	No	Maximum answers to include per question when includeAnswers is true (default: 3, max: 10)
proxyConfiguration	Object	No	Proxy settings for outgoing requests

Output

The Actor outputs a dataset where each item represents a Stack Overflow question with the following fields:

{
  "questionId": 12345678,
  "title": "How to use async/await in JavaScript?",
  "body": "I am trying to understand async/await...",
  "link": "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345678/how-to-use-async-await-in-javascript",
  "score": 42,
  "viewCount": 15023,
  "answerCount": 5,
  "tags": ["javascript", "async-await", "es6"],
  "creationDate": "2023-01-15T08:30:00.000Z",
  "lastActivityDate": "2024-03-10T14:22:00.000Z",
  "isAnswered": true,
  "owner": {
    "userId": 9876543,
    "displayName": "JohnDoe",
    "reputation": 12500,
    "profileLink": "https://stackoverflow.com/users/9876543/johndoe"
  },
  "answers": [
    {
      "answerId": 87654321,
      "body": "You can use async/await like this...",
      "score": 35,
      "isAccepted": true,
      "creationDate": "2023-01-15T09:15:00.000Z",
      "owner": {
        "userId": 1111111,
        "displayName": "JaneSmith",
        "reputation": 45000
      }
    }
  ]
}

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.001 per question extracted. Answers are included at no extra charge when includeAnswers is enabled.

Limitations

• The Stack Exchange API enforces rate limits: 300 requests per day without an API key, 10,000 per day with a free key. This Actor operates within the unauthenticated pool.
• Maximum 100 results per API page; large maxItems values may require multiple sequential requests.
• HTML bodies are sanitized to plain text; inline code and formatting are stripped.
• Very old or deleted questions may not appear in search results.

FAQ

Q: Do I need a Stack Overflow API key? A: No. This Actor uses the public Stack Exchange API without authentication for read-only operations.

Q: Can I extract all answers for a question? A: The Actor fetches the top-voted answers up to the maxAnswersPerQuestion limit. To get all answers, increase the limit or run a dedicated answer extraction job.

Q: Is the data real-time? A: The Stack Exchange API reflects the current state of the platform. Data is typically fresh within seconds of being posted.

Changelog

• v1.0.0 — Initial release. Search questions, filter by tags, optionally include answers.