Hacker News Keyword Monitor 🔔

Track any keyword on Hacker News, automatically. This actor watches Hacker News for the terms you care about and returns new stories and comments that mention them — deduplicated across runs, so you only ever see fresh results, never the same post twice.

Set it on a schedule and it becomes a hands-off alert feed: brand mentions, competitor activity, your product or company name, a technology, a person, or any topic — delivered to a dataset you can export, pipe into a webhook, or connect to Slack, Zapier, and Make.

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💡 What you can use it for

• Brand & reputation monitoring — know the moment your company or product hits the HN front page or comments.
• Competitor tracking — get alerted when a rival launches, raises, or gets discussed.
• Lead & community signals — catch "Ask HN" and "Show HN" posts relevant to your niche.
• Topic & tech tracking — follow a framework, tool, or trend without refreshing HN all day.
• PR & launch monitoring — watch the discussion around your own Show HN in real time.

✨ Features

• 🔎 Searches both stories and comments via the official Hacker News (Algolia) search API — fast and always current.
• 🧠 Deduplicated — remembers what it has already returned, so scheduled runs surface only new mentions.
• ⏱️ Schedule-ready — run it every few minutes or hours for a continuous alert stream.
• 🎚️ Filters — minimum points, stories-only, and a per-run item cap.
• 📤 Export anywhere — JSON, CSV, Excel, or push to webhooks / Slack / Zapier / Make.

🧾 Input

Field	Type	Description
query	string	The keyword or phrase to watch for.
searchComments	boolean	Also match comments, not just stories.
minPoints	integer	Only return stories at/above this many points (optional).
onlyNewSinceLastRun	boolean	Suppress items already returned in earlier runs.
maxItems	integer	Cap on matches per run.

{
  "query": "your product name",
  "searchComments": true,
  "minPoints": null,
  "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
  "maxItems": 50
}

📦 Output

Each match is one dataset item:

{
  "type": "story",
  "title": "Show HN: My new tool",
  "text": null,
  "author": "pg",
  "points": 142,
  "numComments": 37,
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345678",
  "createdAt": "2026-07-11T03:20:24Z",
  "foundAt": "2026-07-11T07:19:06Z"
}

⏰ Recommended setup

1. Set query to your keyword and turn on onlyNewSinceLastRun.
2. Create a Schedule (e.g. every hour).
3. Connect an integration (Slack, webhook, email, Zapier) to be notified on new matches.

That's it — a fully automated Hacker News alert for your keyword.

❓ FAQ

How often should I run it? Anywhere from every few minutes to a few times a day. Dedup means you'll never get repeats regardless of frequency.

Does it cover comments? Yes — set searchComments to true (default).

Will I get the same post twice? No. With onlyNewSinceLastRun on, each run returns only items it hasn't returned before.

What does it cost? Pay-per-event: a small charge per run plus per new result. You pay only for runs you trigger and results you receive.

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Keywords: Hacker News scraper, HN monitor, keyword alerts, brand monitoring, competitor tracking, mention tracking, news monitoring, Hacker News API, HN search, topic alerts.