Hacker News Search API - Stories, Comments, Show HN

Search and monitor Hacker News — stories, comments, Show HN, Ask HN, Launch HN, jobs and the current front page — for any words: your brand, competitors, a domain, a technology, a topic. Get clean rows with points, comment counts, author, timestamps, the outbound link and the HN thread link, plus which of your queries matched. Runs on the official Algolia Hacker News Search API: no key, no scraping, no rate-limit games.

What you can do with it

• Brand and competitor monitoring — every mention of yourproduct.com or Competitor X in stories and comments since yesterday, straight to Slack or email with Apify integrations.
• Launch tracking — all Show HN / Launch HN posts of the week with points and comments; find what resonated.
• Content research — top stories about "rust", "vector database" or "remote work" this month, sorted by points.
• Hiring signals — HN job posts mentioning a stack or a city.
• AI agents — "what is HN saying about X this week?" through the Apify MCP server.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
queries	array	[]	Words or phrases; each searched separately, results merged and deduplicated (matchedQueries shows which matched). Empty = everything of the chosen types.
types	array	["story"]	story, comment, show_hn, ask_hn, launch_hn, job, poll, front_page.
since / until	string	7 days / now	2026-09-01, today, yesterday, 24 hours, 30 days, 1 year; empty since = all time.
sort	select	date	date (newest), relevance, points, comments.
minPoints / minComments	number	0	Thresholds.
exactPhrase	boolean	false	Match queries as exact phrases.
includeText	boolean	true	Comment/story text, HTML stripped.
maxItems	number	500	Cap (Algolia returns at most 1,000 hits per query).

Examples:

{ "queries": ["apify", "apify.com"], "types": ["story", "comment"], "since": "24 hours" }

{ "types": ["show_hn"], "since": "7 days", "sort": "points", "minPoints": 20 }

{ "queries": ["postgres"], "types": ["story"], "since": "30 days", "sort": "comments", "minComments": 50 }

Output

{
  "id": "49643982",
  "type": "show_hn",
  "title": "Show HN: A faster way to scrape sitemaps",
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49643982",
  "storyId": "49643982",
  "storyTitle": null,
  "storyUrl": null,
  "author": "someuser",
  "points": 142,
  "commentsCount": 37,
  "createdAt": "2026-09-10T08:12:44Z",
  "text": null,
  "isFrontPage": true,
  "matchedQueries": ["scrape"],
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-10T15:00:00Z"
}

Comments carry text, storyId, storyTitle and storyUrl so you can jump to the thread. The OUTPUT record in the key-value store lists hits per query and the number of API requests.

Use cases

Ready-made examples you can run without configuring anything:

• Algolia Hacker News search without a key — ready-made task, run it as is
• Monitor Hacker News for brand mentions — ready-made task, run it as is

Algolia Hacker News search without a key

Full-text search over stories and comments through the official Algolia HN API — no key, no scraping, no rate-limit games.

{ "queries": ["postgres"], "types": ["story", "comment"] }

Hacker News search API for brand monitoring

Run it on a schedule with your brand, your competitors and your domain as queries, and every new mention arrives as a row.

{ "queries": ["yourbrand", "yourdomain.com"], "sort": "date" }

Scrape Show HN launches

Show HN and Launch HN posts with points, comment counts and the outbound link — a weekly read on what shipped.

{ "types": ["show_hn"], "sort": "points" }

Pricing

Pay per event: a small fee per Actor start plus a fee per item returned. Current prices are in the Pricing tab.

Good to know

• Algolia's HN index updates within seconds of a post; points and comment counts are as of the search time. Run again later for fresh numbers.
• One query returns at most 1,000 hits. Narrow the period or split by type for exhaustive pulls.
• Searching with no query and a wide period returns a lot; keep since tight or set minPoints.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

Add the Actor to the Apify MCP server and ask: "What did Hacker News say about SQLite this week?" → { "queries": ["sqlite"], "types": ["story", "comment"], "since": "7 days" }.

Related Actors

• Remote Jobs Scraper
• Prediction Markets API
• SEC EDGAR API

Disclaimer

Not affiliated with Y Combinator or Hacker News. Data comes from the public Algolia HN Search API; content belongs to its authors.

Cost control

Pay per event only works if you can see the bill before you pay it:

• Set dryRun to count every result and print what a full run would cost - nothing is charged, and only a few sample rows are stored.
• You are charged only for rows actually delivered to the dataset; a run that finds nothing costs nothing beyond the start event.
• maxItems is respected exactly, and the run stops before the platform's Max total charge for the run.
• Every run writes a COST record to the key-value store: chargeable events, charged events, the amount in USD and whether a limit was hit.