MSN Weather Location Search Scraper
Pricing
from $0.47 / 1,000 location searches
MSN Weather Location Search Scraper
Resolves free-text place names to MSN's own location-suggestion entities, via MSN's own public weather API.
Unofficial, reverse-engineered wrapper around MSN's own public weather API. Resolves free-text place names to location-suggestion entities (places, addresses, businesses) as structured JSON — no scraping, no HTML parsing, no login required.
What
A run-based Actor that takes a list of free-text place names, looks each one up against MSN's own location-autosuggest backend, and pushes one row per matched suggestion to the dataset.
Why
Useful as a standalone lookup (e.g. to show a user a disambiguation list for an ambiguous place name), or to feed into another pipeline that needs MSN's own entity ids for a place.
Input
| Field | Type | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
queries | array of strings | Yes | One or more free-text place names to look up. |
market | string | No (default en-us) | Affects the language of returned suggestions. |
Output
One dataset row per matched suggestion per query:
Field names and shapes beyond query/market follow MSN's own suggestion-entity format directly — shape varies by _type (Place, Address, LocalBusiness).
Known limitations
- This Actor does not return decimal coordinates — MSN's location-autosuggest backend returns entity ids and address text, not lat/lon. It's a disambiguation/lookup step, not a geocoder.
- A query with no matches is skipped with a logged note rather than producing an empty row.
- This Actor only wraps the weather vertical's location lookup — no news, finance, or sports data.
Pricing
Pay-per-event:
apify-actor-start— flat fee per run.location-search— one charge per query successfully looked up.
