Stack Overflow Scraper

Scrape questions, answers, and user data from Stack Overflow — the largest programming Q&A community with 24M+ questions. Uses the official Stack Exchange API v2.3 for structured, rate-limit-aware data extraction.

What can it do?

• Search questions — Full-text search with tag filtering
• Questions by tag — Browse questions for any technology (python, react, rust, etc.)
• Question detail — Full question with all answers, comments, and vote counts
• Answers — Get all answers for a specific question
• User profiles — Reputation, badges, top posts, and activity
• Browse tags — Discover popular tags with question counts

Why use this scraper?

• 🔍 Powerful search — Combine keywords + tags for precise results
• 📊 Vote data — See what the community values most
• 🏷️ Tag system — Filter by any technology or topic
• 👤 User insights — Find top contributors and experts
• ⚡ API-based — Fast, structured data with no browser overhead
• 🔄 Flexible sorting — By relevance, votes, date, activity, or trending

Input examples

Search questions

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "python async await",
  "maxResults": 30,
  "sort": "relevance"
}

Search with tag filter

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "memory leak",
  "tagged": "javascript;react",
  "sort": "votes",
  "maxResults": 50
}

Questions by tag (trending)

{
  "mode": "questions",
  "tagged": "rust",
  "sort": "hot",
  "maxResults": 30
}

Full question with answers

{
  "mode": "question_detail",
  "questionId": 11227809
}

User profile

{
  "mode": "user_profile",
  "userId": 22656
}

Browse popular tags

{
  "mode": "tags",
  "sort": "popular",
  "maxResults": 50
}

Output example

Search result

{
  "question_id": 11227809,
  "title": "Why is processing a sorted array faster than processing an unsorted array?",
  "link": "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809",
  "tags": ["java", "c++", "performance", "cpu-architecture", "branch-prediction"],
  "score": 27500,
  "answer_count": 26,
  "view_count": 2100000,
  "is_answered": true,
  "accepted_answer_id": 11227902,
  "owner": {
    "display_name": "GManNickG",
    "reputation": 503000
  },
  "creation_date": 1340805893
}

Tips

• Use tagged with semicolons for multiple tags: "javascript;node.js" matches questions with BOTH tags
• Sort options vary by mode: relevance and votes for search, hot/week/month for questions
• The API returns max 100 results per run — use filters to get the most relevant data
• question_detail mode returns the full answer body with HTML — great for content analysis
• Rate limits: Stack Exchange API allows ~300 requests/day without auth, which is plenty for most scrapes