Google Short Videos Search: TikTok, Reels, Shorts in One

Search Google's Short videos tab for any keywords and get TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Facebook videos in one list, with duplicates removed across platforms and URL formats.

Turn on monitoring mode and schedule it to receive only the videos that are new since your last run. That is useful for tracking a topic, a brand or a research question over weeks or months.

Why use it

• One search, four platforms. Google already indexes short videos from TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. This Actor reads that tab, so you don't need four separate scrapers.
• Clean, de-duplicated links. The same video often appears under several URLs, such as /shorts/ID and /watch?v=ID, or /p/ID and /reel/ID. Tracking parameters are stripped and each video appears once, keyed as platform:videoId.
• Direct video URLs. Google hides most links behind redirects. The Actor follows them and returns the real TikTok, Instagram or Facebook URL, ready for downloaders such as yt-dlp.
• Only new videos. In monitoring mode, runs that share a monitor name remember which videos they have already returned.

Who uses it

• Researchers building datasets of social media videos on a health, parenting, political or consumer topic. The logic comes from a university research pipeline that tracks short videos about health supplements and parenting advice.
• Brand and PR teams watching for new videos that mention a product, a campaign or a competitor.
• Marketers and agencies finding creators who post about a niche, across all major short-video platforms at once.
• Journalists and fact-checkers monitoring how a claim spreads in short-form video.

Input

{
  "queries": ["gentle parenting timeout", "menopause supplements"],
  "platforms": ["youtube", "tiktok", "instagram", "facebook"],
  "maxPagesPerQuery": 5,
  "countryCode": "US",
  "languageCode": "en",
  "onlyNewResults": true,
  "monitorName": "parenting-study"
}

Field	What it does
queries	Search terms, one per line. Required.
platforms	Keep only these platforms. Add other to also keep X, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, Vimeo and Dailymotion.
maxPagesPerQuery	Google shows about 10 to 12 videos per page. The Actor stops early when results run out.
maxResultsPerQuery	Optional cap per query.
countryCode, languageCode	Where to search from and the interface language.
resolveLinks	Follow Google's redirect links to get direct video URLs. On by default. Turn it off for much faster runs when titles and authors are enough.
onlyNewResults, monitorName	Monitoring mode. Runs with the same monitor name skip videos returned before.

Output

One item per unique video:

{
  "query": "gentle parenting timeout",
  "position": 3,
  "page": 1,
  "platform": "tiktok",
  "title": "Dr. Becky Debunks Timeout, Tantrums & Gentle Parenting",
  "author": "unplanned_podcast",
  "source": "TikTok",
  "duration": "0:46",
  "durationSeconds": 46,
  "link": "https://www.tiktok.com/@unplanned_podcast/video/7696627644179156237",
  "linkResolved": true,
  "videoId": "7696627644179156237",
  "videoKey": "tiktok:7696627644179156237",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-31T12:31:02.118Z"
}

If a redirect cannot be followed, linkResolved is false and link holds Google's redirect URL, which still opens the video in a browser. A run summary is saved as SUMMARY in the key-value store.

Pricing

You pay per unique video returned. Duplicates, filtered platforms and already-seen videos in monitoring mode are free. The price is on the Actor's pricing tab. Set a maximum cost per run and the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached.

Tips

• Schedule a daily or weekly run with monitoring mode on to build a growing dataset without duplicates.
• Use several phrasings of the same topic. Duplicates across queries are removed automatically.
• Google returns different videos by country. Run the same queries with different countryCode values to compare markets.

Limits

• Results are what Google shows on its Short videos tab, typically up to a few hundred videos per query.
• Google throttles its redirect links. Most are resolved, but some may come back as Google redirect URLs during busy periods.
• Titles for Instagram and some Facebook videos are caption snippets, because that is what Google displays.
• The Actor collects only what Google shows publicly in search results. It does not log in to any platform or download videos.