📰 Google News Scraper — Canonical Publisher URLs, Brand & Topic Tracking

Scrape Google News for any keyword, brand or topic across 50+ countries and 30+ languages. Unlike most Google News scrapers, this Actor returns canonical publisher URLs (not Google redirect links) plus source domains, thumbnails, publication dates and 100+ results per query — all exported to JSON, CSV or Excel.

Track brands, monitor topics, build news datasets and power PR and crisis-monitoring pipelines. Pure HTTP with a ~3-second cold start, no login, no API key and no proxy required for typical use.

✨ What this Actor does / Key features

• 🔗 Canonical publisher URLs — resolves Google News redirects to the real article URL on the publisher's site
• 🌍 50+ countries, 30+ languages — any Google News language/country combination, including non-Latin scripts
• 🔎 Four feed modes — keyword search, topic browsing, location-based news and country top headlines
• 🧮 Supports Google search operators in queries — exact phrase, OR, -exclude, site:, intitle:
• 📅 Date range filters (fromDate/toDate) and a recent timeWindow operator
• 🏷️ Source whitelist & blacklist by publisher domain
• 📈 100+ results per query via automatic time-window stitching (up to 500 per query) with GUID deduplication
• 🖼️ Extracts source domain, source homepage URL and article thumbnails
• ⚡ Pure HTTP — ~3s cold start, multi-query batch with cross-query dedup

🔍 Input

Field	Type	Description
queries	array	Search keywords/topics. Each becomes a separate Google News feed. Supports "exact phrase", OR, -word, site:domain.com, intitle:word. Leave empty if using topic or geoLocation.
topic	string (select)	Browse top stories by topic instead of searching: WORLD, NATION, BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS, SCIENCE, HEALTH.
geoLocation	string	Get news for a specific city/region (English name, e.g. London, Tokyo).
topHeadlines	boolean	Fetch the main Google News top headlines feed for the selected language/country, overriding queries/topic/geo.
language	string	Google News interface language (e.g. en-US, fr, de, ja, ar, tr).
country	string	ISO 2-letter country code (e.g. US, GB, DE, JP, IN).
maxArticles	integer	Max articles per query/feed (0–500). Above 100, the Actor stitches multiple time-windowed feeds and deduplicates.
timeWindow	string (select)	Restrict to a recent window: 1h, 12h, 1d, 7d, 30d, 1y. Ignored when maxArticles > 100.
fromDate / toDate	string	ISO date filters applied post-fetch on publication date.
includeSources	array	Whitelist of publisher domains — only these sources are returned.
excludeSources	array	Blacklist of publisher domains — these sources are filtered out.
resolveUrls	boolean	Follow Google News redirects to return the canonical publisher URL (default true).
extractThumbnails	boolean	Include the article thumbnail image URL when available (default true).
proxyConfiguration	object	Optional Apify proxy — rarely needed, Google News RSS seldom rate-limits.

🚀 Example input

{
  "queries": ["openai", "\"artificial intelligence\" -hype site:reuters.com"],
  "maxArticles": 200,
  "language": "en-US",
  "country": "US",
  "fromDate": "2026-04-01",
  "toDate": "2026-05-01",
  "includeSources": ["reuters.com", "bloomberg.com", "ft.com"],
  "resolveUrls": true
}

📦 Output

Each article is saved as one structured record.

Field	Description
title	Article headline (Google's - Publisher suffix stripped)
description	Plain-text article snippet (HTML stripped)
source	Publisher display name (e.g. Reuters, BBC)
sourceDomain	Publisher apex domain (e.g. reuters.com) — easy filtering
sourceUrl	Publisher homepage URL
link	Google News redirect URL (always present)
originalUrl	Canonical publisher URL when resolveUrls is on
thumbnailUrl	Article thumbnail image URL when available
publishedAt	Publication date/time in ISO 8601 (UTC)
publishedAtRaw	Original RFC 822 date string from the RSS feed
guid	Unique Google News article identifier
query	Search query that found this article (search mode)
topic	Topic code (topic mode)
geoLocation	Location name (geo mode)
feedType	search, topic, geo or top_headlines
language / country	Feed language and country codes used
timeWindow	Time window applied to this fetch, or null
scrapedAt	When the article was scraped (ISO 8601)

Three pre-built dataset views are included: Overview, By query and By source. Export as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML.

💡 Use cases

• PR & brand monitoring — track every mention of your company or competitors across the global news cycle.
• Investment & market research — real-time news signals for stocks, crypto, commodities and geopolitical events.
• Crisis monitoring — hourly scheduled runs alert your team when negative coverage breaks.
• SEO & content teams — discover which publishers cover your industry and find backlink opportunities.
• News curation — build daily newsletters, briefings and RSS-to-Slack pipelines.
• AI / ML teams — assemble clean, structured news datasets with canonical URLs for NLP, sentiment and summarization models.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a Google account or API key? No. The Actor reads publicly available Google News RSS feeds — the same data any RSS reader can access. No login and no API key required.

Is this legal? The Actor accesses public Google News feeds. Use the data responsibly: respect publisher copyrights, link to original sources, and do not republish full article text. Comply with GDPR and privacy laws for any downstream use.

Why are some originalUrl fields null? A small percentage of Google News redirects fail or time out. Use the raw link field as a fallback, or increase the Actor's timeout in the Apify console.

Can I get the full article text? No — the Actor returns headlines, snippets and URLs. Pipe originalUrl into a content-extraction tool (e.g. Trafilatura, Mozilla Readability) for full text.

How do I get more than 100 results per query? Set maxArticles above 100. Google News RSS caps a single feed at ~100 items, so the Actor automatically requests multiple time-windowed feeds and deduplicates by GUID, delivering up to 500 per query.

Does Google rate-limit this? Google News RSS is generous and most users never hit limits. If you do, enable Apify Proxy in the input config.

Does it support non-English / non-Latin scripts? Yes. Queries are URL-encoded properly and Google News supports all major scripts (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, etc.) — just set the right language and country.

What output formats are supported? Results are stored in an Apify dataset and can be exported as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML, or pulled via the Apify API.

⏰ Scheduling & integration

Schedule this Actor on Apify to monitor brands and topics hourly or daily. Export results to JSON, CSV or Excel, call it via the Apify API, or connect it to Slack, Google Sheets and webhooks through Apify integrations for automated news alerts and digests.

---

Changelog

• 2026-06-01 — Maintenance & reliability pass: pulled the latest source and rebuilt the Actor on the current base image; build verified.

• 2026-05-25 — Maintenance & reliability pass: pulled the latest source and rebuilt the Actor on the current base image; build verified.

Last reviewed: 2026-06-01.