Facebook Posts Search Scraper with Comments & Date Range

Search Facebook for public posts by keyword, then pull each post's own comment thread (top-level comments plus the first page of replies) and filter results to an exact date range. Built as a superset of the base Facebook Posts Search Scraper — every original input and output field still works — plus two genuinely new capabilities: a comment/reply child dataset per post, and a real, push-time-enforced startDate/endDate filter.

Key Features

• Keyword-based post discovery — search Facebook for posts matching one or more topics
• Real comment & reply extraction — fetches each post's own permalink page and collects its actual top-level comments plus the first page of replies per comment, tagged as child rows (type: "comment" / "reply", isChild: true)
• Absolute date-range filter — set startDate/endDate to only keep posts published in that exact window, enforced before rows are pushed to the Output table (not just an in-memory count)
• Engagement metrics — likes, comments, shares per post
• Live output — results (posts and comments) appear in the dataset as they're scraped
• Honest coverage flags — commentsFetched and commentsTruncated disclose exactly how many comments were collected and whether more exist beyond what server-rendered HTML exposes

Input

Field	Type	Description
searchQueries	array	Search keywords, e.g. ["football", "cricket"]
maxPosts	integer	Max posts to collect per keyword (1–5,000, default 10)
postTimeRange	string	Quick recency bucket: 24h, 7d, 30d, 90d, or empty for all time
fetchComments	boolean	Collect each post's comment + reply thread (default true)
maxCommentsPerPost	integer	Cap on top-level comments collected per post (0 = unlimited, default 20)
startDate	string	Only include posts on/after this date (absolute or relative, e.g. 2026-07-01 or "7 days")
endDate	string	Only include posts on/before this date
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy settings (Apify Proxy enabled by default)

Example input:

{
  "searchQueries": ["football", "cricket"],
  "maxPosts": 20,
  "fetchComments": true,
  "maxCommentsPerPost": 20,
  "startDate": "2026-01-01",
  "endDate": "",
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

Output

Post rows (type absent/"post"-shaped, same 17 fields as the base actor plus 2 new ones):

• facebookUrl, pageId, pageName, facebookId – Page info
• postId, postFacebookId, url, topLevelUrl – Post identifiers
• time, timestamp – Post date
• likes, comments, shares – Engagement
• text, link, thumb – Content
• commentsFetched, commentsTruncated – how many comment rows were collected for this post, and whether more exist beyond what was fetched
• searchQuery – the query that matched this post

Comment/reply rows (type: "comment" or "reply", isChild: true), pushed to the same Output table plus mirrored to a per-run child dataset:

• postId, url – links the row back to its parent post
• commentId, parentCommentId – parentCommentId is set only on reply rows
• authorName, authorUrl – commenter identity, when Facebook renders it
• text, time, timestamp – comment content and date
• searchQuery – inherited from the parent post

How to Use

1. Open Apify Console → Actors
2. Select Facebook Posts Search Scraper With Comments & Date Range
3. Enter search keywords, choose a max posts count, and (optionally) a date range
4. Toggle comment fetching on/off and set a per-post comment cap
5. Run the actor
6. View posts and comment/reply rows together in the OUTPUT tab
7. Export as JSON or CSV

Coverage notes

• Comment/reply extraction reads what Facebook's own server-rendered page already includes — long threads are not fully paginated, so commentsTruncated: true on a post means more comments exist than were collected.
• shares is left null (never a faked 0) when the field genuinely isn't present in a post's payload.
• Discovery is keyword-driven: results reflect Facebook Pages currently matching the search terms and their newest visible content.

Cautions

• Data is from public sources only
• You are responsible for legal compliance (privacy, ToS, etc.)