News Monitor Pro — Brand & Topic Tracking

Track news for any keyword, brand, or topic across 50+ countries and 30+ languages. Get real article URLs, source domains, thumbnails — not just Google redirect links.

The only Google News scraper that gives you canonical publisher URLs (not Google redirects), source domains, thumbnails, date filters, source whitelists/blacklists, and 100+ results per query via smart time-window stitching. Pure HTTP — 3-second cold start, no proxy required.

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🎯 Use cases

• PR / brand monitoring — Track every mention of your company or competitors across the global news cycle
• SEO / content teams — Discover which publishers cover your industry, monitor backlink opportunities
• Investment research — Real-time news signals for stocks, crypto, commodities, geopolitical events
• Crisis monitoring — Hourly scheduled runs alert your team when negative coverage breaks
• Content curation — Build daily newsletters, briefings, RSS-to-Slack pipelines
• AI / ML training — Clean, structured news datasets for NLP, sentiment analysis, summarization models
• Market research — Track industry trends across countries, languages, and time windows
• Compliance / regulatory monitoring — Watch news for keywords across regulated industries (pharma, finance, etc.)

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✨ Why this scraper beats the rest

Feature	This actor	Other Google News scrapers
Canonical publisher URLs (not Google redirects)	✅ Built-in	❌ Premium upsell or missing
Source domain extraction	✅	❌ Source name only
Thumbnail image URLs	✅	❌
Date range filter (from/to)	✅	❌
Source whitelist / blacklist	✅	❌
100+ articles per query (time-window stitching)	✅	❌ Capped at 100
Top headlines + topic + geo + search (all 4 modes)	✅	⚠️ Search only or topic only
Multi-query batch with cross-dedup	✅	⚠️ Some
Pure HTTP (no browser, no proxy)	✅ 3s cold start	✅ Same

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📥 Input

Quick start — search for a brand

{
  "queries": ["openai", "anthropic claude"],
  "maxArticles": 50,
  "language": "en-US",
  "country": "US"
}

Search with operators

Google News supports full search operator syntax in queries:

Operator	Meaning	Example
"phrase"	Exact match	"climate policy"
OR	Boolean OR	tesla OR spacex
-word	Exclude	apple -fruit
site:domain.com	Limit to source	apify site:techcrunch.com
intitle:word	In title only	intitle:OpenAI

{
  "queries": ["\"artificial intelligence\" -hype site:reuters.com"],
  "maxArticles": 100
}

Browse by topic (curated top stories)

{
  "topic": "TECHNOLOGY",
  "language": "en-US",
  "country": "US",
  "maxArticles": 50
}

Available topics: WORLD, NATION, BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS, SCIENCE, HEALTH.

News from a specific location

{
  "geoLocation": "London",
  "language": "en-GB",
  "country": "GB",
  "maxArticles": 30
}

Top headlines (daily digest)

{
  "topHeadlines": true,
  "language": "en-US",
  "country": "US"
}

Power features — time range + source filter

{
  "queries": ["climate change"],
  "maxArticles": 200,
  "fromDate": "2026-04-01",
  "toDate": "2026-05-01",
  "includeSources": ["reuters.com", "bloomberg.com", "ft.com", "wsj.com"]
}

When maxArticles > 100, the actor automatically fetches multiple time-windowed feeds (when:1h, when:1d, when:7d, when:30d, when:1y), deduplicates by article GUID, and returns up to 500 articles per query.

Non-English news

{
  "queries": ["bourse économie"],
  "language": "fr",
  "country": "FR",
  "maxArticles": 50
}

{
  "queries": ["半導体 NVIDIA"],
  "language": "ja",
  "country": "JP",
  "maxArticles": 30
}

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📤 Output fields

Every dataset row contains:

Field	Type	Description
title	string	Article headline (source suffix stripped from Google's format)
description	string | null	Article snippet, HTML stripped, plain text, max 500 chars
source	string | null	Publisher name (e.g. "Reuters", "TechCrunch", "BBC")
sourceDomain	string | null	Publisher domain (e.g. "reuters.com") — easy filtering
sourceUrl	string | null	Publisher homepage URL from the RSS <source> tag
link	string	Google News redirect URL (always set)
originalUrl	string | null	Canonical publisher URL when resolveUrls=true (default ON)
thumbnailUrl	string | null	Article thumbnail image URL when available
publishedAt	string | null	Publication date in ISO 8601 (UTC)
publishedAtRaw	string | null	Original RFC 2822 date string from RSS
guid	string | null	Unique Google News article identifier
query	string | null	Search query that found this article (search mode)
topic	string | null	Topic category (topic mode)
geoLocation	string | null	Geographic location (geo mode)
feedType	string	search, topic, geo, or top_headlines
language	string	Language code used
country	string	Country code used
timeWindow	string | null	Time window used (e.g. 1d, 7d) or null
scrapedAt	string	When this article was scraped (ISO 8601)

Example output row

{
  "title": "OpenAI Unveils Next-Generation Reasoning Model",
  "description": "The new model targets regulated industries with improved factual accuracy and audit logs.",
  "source": "Reuters",
  "sourceDomain": "reuters.com",
  "sourceUrl": "https://www.reuters.com",
  "link": "https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiYmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnJldXRl...",
  "originalUrl": "https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-unveils-next-gen-reasoning-model-2026-04-21/",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/...",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-21T15:30:00.000Z",
  "publishedAtRaw": "Mon, 21 Apr 2026 15:30:00 GMT",
  "guid": "CBMiYmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnJldXRl...",
  "query": "openai",
  "topic": null,
  "geoLocation": null,
  "feedType": "search",
  "language": "en-US",
  "country": "US",
  "timeWindow": null,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-13T08:15:42.310Z"
}

---

🌍 Languages & countries supported

Any Google News-supported combination works. Common examples:

• 🇺🇸 language=en-US, country=US
• 🇬🇧 language=en-GB, country=GB
• 🇫🇷 language=fr, country=FR
• 🇩🇪 language=de, country=DE
• 🇪🇸 language=es, country=ES
• 🇮🇹 language=it, country=IT
• 🇧🇷 language=pt-BR, country=BR
• 🇯🇵 language=ja, country=JP
• 🇨🇳 language=zh-CN, country=CN
• 🇹🇷 language=tr, country=TR
• 🇸🇦 language=ar, country=SA
• 🇮🇳 language=hi, country=IN

Just supply the right language and country codes — the actor adapts automatically.

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⚡ Performance

• Cold start: ~3 seconds (no browser, no native deps)
• Throughput: 100 articles in 5 seconds; 500 articles in 25 seconds
• Memory: 256 MB (default)
• No proxy needed for typical usage — Google News RSS is generous with rate limits

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💡 Common workflows

Daily brand monitoring → Slack

1. Schedule this actor to run every morning at 8:00
2. Input: { "queries": ["your brand"], "fromDate": "yesterday", "maxArticles": 50 }
3. Set up Integrations → Slack webhook
4. Every new article gets posted to your team's channel

Multi-country campaign tracking

{
  "queries": ["nike sustainability"],
  "maxArticles": 50
}

Run with country=US, then country=GB, then country=DE, etc. — merge datasets to see global coverage.

AI training dataset

{
  "topic": "TECHNOLOGY",
  "maxArticles": 500,
  "language": "en-US",
  "country": "US",
  "resolveUrls": true
}

Schedule daily for one month → ~15,000 deduplicated tech articles with canonical URLs. Pipe originalUrl into a content extractor (Trafilatura, Newspaper3k) for full-text training data.

Stock signal monitoring

{
  "queries": ["NVDA earnings", "NVDA layoffs", "NVDA lawsuit"],
  "timeWindow": "1h",
  "maxArticles": 30,
  "includeSources": ["reuters.com", "bloomberg.com", "wsj.com", "ft.com"]
}

Schedule hourly. Pipe to a webhook that triggers an alert when count > 0.

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❓ FAQ

Q: Why are some originalUrl fields null? A: A few percent of Google News redirects fail or time out. Try increasing the actor's timeout in Apify Console settings, or use the raw link field as fallback.

Q: Can I get full article text? A: This actor returns headlines, snippets, and URLs. For full article text, pipe originalUrl into a content-extraction actor (e.g. Mozilla Readability, Trafilatura).

Q: Does Google rate-limit me? A: Google News RSS is generous — most users never hit rate limits even at high volumes. If you do see rate limit errors, enable Apify Proxy in the input config.

Q: Why does maxArticles cap below 100 per query without stitching? A: Google News RSS itself caps single-feed responses at ~100 items. We work around this by requesting multiple time-windowed feeds and deduplicating — that's what triggers when you set maxArticles > 100.

Q: Can I search by URL substring or specific publisher? A: Use the site:domain.com operator inside your query, or use includeSources for post-filter whitelisting. Both work — site: filters at Google's side (cheaper), includeSources filters after fetching.

Q: Does this work for languages with non-Latin scripts (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, etc.)? A: Yes — queries are URL-encoded properly and Google News supports all major scripts. Just set the right language and country codes.

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📜 Legal & ethical

This actor accesses publicly available Google News RSS feeds — the same data accessible to any RSS reader. No login required, no terms-of-service violation. Use the data responsibly:

• ✅ Respect publisher copyrights — don't republish full article text without permission
• ✅ Aggregate data and link to original sources
• ✅ Comply with GDPR / privacy laws for any downstream use of personal data in articles
• ❌ Don't use this to mass-scrape and republish news content