💬 Stack Overflow Scraper

🚀 Export Stack Overflow questions, scores, tags, and author data in seconds. No login required.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-21 · 📊 16 fields per record · Up to 1,000,000 questions · Stack Overflow (global)

The Stack Overflow Scraper lets you extract questions from Stack Overflow using the official Stack Exchange public API v2.3. Search by keyword, filter by tags, sort by votes or recency, and download structured data instantly - no API key required for standard usage.

Stack Overflow hosts over 58 million questions spanning virtually every programming topic. This scraper gives you programmatic access to that knowledge base: question scores, answer counts, view counts, accepted answers, author reputation, tags, and more - all in clean JSON ready for CSV, Excel, or direct integration.

Coverage: All public Stack Overflow questions accessible via the Stack Exchange API. Covers millions of questions across thousands of tags, from JavaScript and Python to DevOps and machine learning. Every record includes 16 structured fields.

Who uses it	Why
Developers	Track trends in frameworks and languages
Researchers	Study Q&A dynamics, tag co-occurrence, community patterns
Data scientists	Build NLP datasets from real technical questions
Tech recruiters	Identify in-demand skills by tag volume and score
Educators	Find top-voted questions for curriculum building
Product managers	Benchmark competitor pain points and developer friction

📋 What the Stack Overflow Scraper does

• Search questions by keyword (title match) across all of Stack Overflow
• Filter questions by one or more tags (e.g. javascript, python,pandas)
• Browse top-voted, most active, or newest questions without a search query
• Sort results by votes, activity, creation date, or relevance
• Capture full metadata: score, answer count, view count, accepted answer ID, bounty amount
• Extract author details: display name and reputation score
• Paginate automatically to hit your exact maxItems target

💡 Why it matters: Stack Overflow is the world's largest developer Q&A platform. Bulk access to its question data unlocks trend analysis, skill mapping, content research, and NLP dataset construction - none of which are possible through the website UI alone.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Description	Default
searchQuery	string	Search for questions by title keywords	javascript async await
maxItems	integer	Max questions to return (free: 10, paid: up to 1,000,000)	10
tags	string	Comma-separated tags to filter by, e.g. javascript,python	javascript
sortBy	select	Sort order: votes, activity, creation, relevance	votes
apiKey	string	Optional free API key from stackapps.com for 10,000 req/day	-

JSON example - search by keyword:

{
  "searchQuery": "javascript async await",
  "sortBy": "votes",
  "maxItems": 50
}

JSON example - filter by tags:

{
  "tags": "python,pandas",
  "sortBy": "activity",
  "maxItems": 100
}

⚠️ Good to Know: The Stack Exchange API returns up to 300 requests/day without an API key. For large exports, grab a free key at stackapps.com and paste it in the apiKey field to unlock 10,000 requests/day. Each page fetches up to 100 questions, so 300 requests covers 30,000 items without a key.

📊 Output

Field	Type	Description
📌 title	string	Question title (HTML-decoded)
🔗 url	string	Direct link to the question
🆔 questionId	integer	Stack Overflow question ID
⬆️ score	integer	Net upvotes minus downvotes
💬 answerCount	integer	Number of answers posted
👁️ viewCount	integer	Total views
✅ isAnswered	boolean	Whether question has an accepted or highly-voted answer
🏆 acceptedAnswerId	integer	ID of the accepted answer (null if none)
🏷️ tags	array	List of tag slugs
👤 author	string	Display name of the question author
⭐ authorReputation	integer	Author's Stack Overflow reputation score
💰 bountyAmount	integer	Active bounty amount (null if no bounty)
📅 createdAt	string	ISO 8601 creation timestamp
🕒 lastActivityAt	string	ISO 8601 last activity timestamp
🔄 scrapedAt	string	ISO 8601 scrape timestamp
❌ error	string	Error message if scraping failed (null otherwise)

Sample records (real output):

[
  {
    "title": "javascript : Async/await in .replace",
    "url": "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33631041/javascript-async-await-in-replace",
    "questionId": 33631041,
    "score": 45,
    "answerCount": 9,
    "viewCount": 21472,
    "isAnswered": true,
    "acceptedAnswerId": null,
    "tags": ["javascript", "async-await", "es6-promise", "ecmascript-2016"],
    "author": "ritz078",
    "authorReputation": 2367,
    "bountyAmount": null,
    "createdAt": "2015-11-10T13:23:33.000Z",
    "lastActivityAt": "2024-12-15T03:37:58.000Z",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-05-22T01:25:13.303Z",
    "error": null
  },
  {
    "title": "javascript async/await not working",
    "url": "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43359528/javascript-async-await-not-working",
    "questionId": 43359528,
    "score": 33,
    "answerCount": 2,
    "viewCount": 88921,
    "isAnswered": true,
    "acceptedAnswerId": 43359856,
    "tags": ["javascript", "async-await"],
    "author": "noobie",
    "authorReputation": 2617,
    "bountyAmount": null,
    "createdAt": "2017-04-12T03:04:08.000Z",
    "lastActivityAt": "2019-03-15T20:36:26.000Z",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-05-22T01:25:13.303Z",
    "error": null
  },
  {
    "title": "Why does this JavaScript async/await code not behave as expected?",
    "url": "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47796000/why-does-this-javascript-async-await-code-not-behave-as-expected",
    "questionId": 47796000,
    "score": 13,
    "answerCount": 4,
    "viewCount": 1242,
    "isAnswered": true,
    "acceptedAnswerId": 47796089,
    "tags": ["javascript", "asynchronous", "async-await"],
    "author": "HanifC",
    "authorReputation": 175,
    "bountyAmount": null,
    "createdAt": "2017-12-13T14:54:37.000Z",
    "lastActivityAt": "2017-12-13T15:08:03.000Z",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-05-22T01:25:13.303Z",
    "error": null
  }
]

✨ Why choose this Actor

Feature	Benefit
🏛️ Official Stack Exchange API	Stable, documented, rate-limit-aware - no scraping fragility
🔍 Keyword + tag search	Two distinct search modes for flexible targeting
📄 Automatic pagination	Reaches your exact maxItems without manual page management
🔑 Optional API key support	Scale to 10,000 requests/day with a free stackapps.com key
🧹 HTML-decoded titles	No raw & entities in your data
📊 16 structured fields	Score, reputation, bounty, timestamps - everything the API offers
🌐 No login required	Runs on the public API - always available

📈 How it compares to alternatives

	This Actor	Manual browsing	Custom script
Bulk export	Up to 1M items	Impractical	Requires dev time
No login	Yes	Yes	Depends
Structured JSON	Yes	Copy-paste	Yes
Pagination handled	Automatic	Manual	Manual
Cloud-ready	Yes	No	No
Tag + keyword filters	Both supported	Limited	Depends

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free account w/ $5 credit on Apify
2. Open the Stack Overflow Scraper actor page
3. Enter a searchQuery (e.g. react hooks) or a tag list (e.g. python,numpy)
4. Set maxItems and optional sortBy
5. Click Run - results appear in the dataset within seconds
6. Download as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML

💼 Business use cases

Developer Relations and Community Analysis

Map the most-asked questions around your product's technology stack. Track score trends over time to see which developer pain points are growing. Use tags to scope to your SDK, library, or framework. Identify power users by authorReputation.

Recruiting and Skill Intelligence

Filter by technology tags to find which questions are most viewed and answered - a proxy for community depth and talent supply. Compare tag volumes across languages and frameworks to inform hiring roadmaps.

Content Marketing and SEO

Find the highest-voted unanswered or low-answer-count questions in your niche. These are content gaps: blog posts, tutorials, and documentation that your team can own. Sort by viewCount to prioritize reach.

Academic and NLP Research

Build labeled Q&A datasets from real developer questions. Filter by isAnswered and acceptedAnswerId for clean positive examples. Use score as a quality signal for training data curation.

🔌 Automating Stack Overflow Scraper

Connect to your workflow in minutes:

• Make (Integromat): Schedule daily runs via webhook, pipe results into Google Sheets or Airtable
• Zapier: Trigger on actor completion, push new questions to Slack, Notion, or a database
• Apify Scheduler: Set up recurring runs (hourly, daily, weekly) without any code
• REST API: POST /v2/acts/parseforge~stackoverflow-scraper/runs - integrate directly from any backend

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Research and Academia

Study how programming knowledge evolves on Stack Overflow. Analyze tag co-occurrence networks, measure question lifecycle (creation to accepted answer), or track how authorReputation correlates with answer quality.

Creative Projects

Build a daily "question of the day" bot. Create a browser extension that surfaces related Stack Overflow questions based on your current code file. Generate trivia games from top-voted questions.

Non-Profit and Education

Curate free learning resources by extracting the highest-voted questions and answers in beginner-friendly tags like python or html. Build offline reference packs for coding bootcamps with limited connectivity.

Experimentation

Test NLP models on real technical text. Evaluate semantic similarity between question titles. Build a recommendation engine that suggests questions based on tag overlap and score signals.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Not sure which inputs to use? Paste this into any AI assistant:

"I'm using the ParseForge Stack Overflow Scraper on Apify. It exports questions from Stack Overflow via the Stack Exchange API. I want to [describe your goal]. What input configuration should I use?"

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

❓ Do I need a Stack Overflow account? No. The Stack Exchange API is fully public. No login, no OAuth, no credentials required.

❓ What is the rate limit? Without an API key: 300 requests/day. Each request fetches up to 100 questions, so that's 30,000 questions/day. With a free API key from stackapps.com: 10,000 requests/day (1,000,000 questions/day).

❓ How do I get an API key? Register a free app at stackapps.com/apps/oauth/register. You'll get a key immediately. Paste it into the apiKey input field.

❓ Can I scrape other Stack Exchange sites? The current actor is scoped to Stack Overflow. The underlying API supports all Stack Exchange sites - contact ParseForge if you need a version targeting Server Fault, Super User, or other communities.

❓ What's the difference between searchQuery and tags? searchQuery searches question titles for matching keywords (uses the /search endpoint). tags filters by exact tag slugs (uses the /questions?tagged= endpoint). If you provide both, searchQuery takes priority.

❓ What does sortBy "relevance" do? Relevance ranking is only meaningful with a searchQuery. It ranks results by how well the title matches your search terms. Without a search query, the actor falls back to votes.

❓ Are deleted or closed questions included? No. The public API only returns visible, active questions.

❓ Why is acceptedAnswerId null on some records? Not every question has an accepted answer. The field is null when the asker hasn't accepted any answer yet.

❓ Why is bountyAmount null on most records? Active bounties are rare - only questions with an open bounty at scrape time have a non-null value.

❓ How do I scrape questions from a specific time range? The Stack Exchange API supports fromdate and todate Unix timestamp filters. Contact ParseForge to request a version with date range inputs.

❓ Is the data real-time? Yes. Every run fetches live data from the Stack Exchange API. Results reflect the current state of Stack Overflow at scrape time.

❓ Can I run this on a schedule? Yes. Use Apify Scheduler to run daily, weekly, or on any cron interval. Results accumulate in your dataset automatically.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Export your dataset directly to: Google Sheets, Airtable, Notion, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, S3, Excel, CSV, XML, JSON, REST API, GraphQL, Make, Zapier, n8n, Slack, Discord, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more.

🔗 Recommended Actors

Actor	Description
Hacker News Scraper	Export Hacker News stories, scores, and comment counts
Dev.to Scraper	Scrape articles and author data from Dev.to
GitHub Trending Scraper	Extract trending repositories from GitHub

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for 100+ datasets across tech, finance, jobs, and more.

---

This actor uses the Stack Exchange public API and complies with its terms of service. Stack Overflow data is provided under CC BY-SA 4.0. ParseForge is not affiliated with Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange.