Hacker News Search Scraper

Search Hacker News stories by keyword — points, comments, author, URL — via the Algolia HN API.

Search HN stories by keyword and return title, url, author, points, comment count, and the HN discussion link. No account, no API key, and no proxies — this Actor reads a stable public API and returns clean, structured data you can download as JSON, CSV, or Excel, or pull straight from the Apify API.

Features

• ⚡ Fast & reliable — hits a stable public endpoint, so runs don't get blocked or break on layout changes.
• 🎯 Clean structured output — every result is a flat record with consistent fields (title, points, numComments, author, hnUrl).
• 🔁 Batch & schedulable — pass multiple queries in one run, or schedule it for a always-fresh feed.
• 🔌 Integrates everywhere — export JSON/CSV/Excel or connect via the API, webhooks, Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, and 5,000+ integrations.

Who it's for

Trend researchers, social-listening tools, and content marketers.

Common use cases

• Market, competitor, and trend research
• Feeding dashboards, spreadsheets, and internal tools
• Enriching datasets and powering AI / RAG / automation workflows

Input

Field	Type	Description
searchQueries	array	Hacker News search terms (e.g. 'ai', 'startup'). Required.
maxItems	integer	Cap the number of records returned (0 = provider default).

Example input

{
  "searchQueries": [
    "ai",
    "open source"
  ],
  "maxItems": 25
}

Output

One record per result. Example output:

{
  "title": "Example item",
  "points": 1234,
  "numComments": 1234,
  "author": "Example item",
  "hnUrl": "https://example.com/item"
}

Fields: title, points, numComments, author, hnUrl. Download as JSON, CSV, XML, or Excel — or fetch programmatically from the dataset API.

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-result: you're billed only for the records you actually get. No monthly fee, and empty runs cost nothing — so it's dramatically cheaper than manual research or bloated data subscriptions.

FAQ

Do I need an API key or login? No — it uses a public endpoint. How fresh is the data? It's fetched live on every run, so it's as current as the source. Can I run it automatically? Yes — schedule it (hourly / daily / weekly) or trigger it via API or webhook. How do I get more results? Increase maxItems, or pass several queries in a single run. What formats can I export? JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, RSS, or via the API.

Notes

This Actor reads a public API. Please use it responsibly and within the data provider's terms of service.