Hacker News Search: Stories, Comments and Top Lists

Search every story or comment ever posted on Hacker News, or get the live lists (front page, new, best, Ask HN, Show HN, jobs). Each result comes back as small, clean JSON with points, comment counts and plain text. Stories can include their top comments.

It reads Hacker News's two public APIs: the official Firebase API for the live lists, and Algolia's HN Search API for search. It doesn't scrape the website.

Who it's for

• AI agents and assistants that need "what is HN saying about X" in the middle of a task. Inputs are one line and outputs are small.
• Founders and marketers tracking mentions of a product, a competitor or a topic.
• Researchers and analysts studying what the tech community discusses, and when.
• Newsletters and dashboards that show the front page or the best of the week.

Input

Field	What it does
Search for	Words to search for, e.g. rust or openai. Leave empty to get a live list instead
List	When not searching: Top (front page), New, Best, Ask HN, Show HN or Jobs
Search in	Stories or Comments
Search order	Best match or Newest first
Only from the last N days	0 means any time
Minimum points	Only stories with at least this many upvotes
Max results	Up to 1,000 (default 20)
Top comments per story	Adds each story's first N comments (0 to 10), in the order Hacker News shows them

Examples:

{ "query": "openai", "days": 7, "minPoints": 100, "topComments": 3 }

{ "list": "show", "maxItems": 30 }

{ "query": "postgres", "searchType": "comments", "sort": "newest", "maxItems": 50 }

Output

One row per story or comment. A real story from the front page, with one top comment (text shortened):

{
  "id": 50152307,
  "type": "story",
  "title": "Wine Ported to OpenBSD",
  "url": "https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=179236125692175",
  "domain": "marc.info",
  "text": null,
  "author": "iamnothere",
  "points": 212,
  "comments": 55,
  "createdAt": "2026-10-19T13:35:34Z",
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50152307",
  "rank": 1,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-19T16:00:00Z",
  "topComments": [
    {
      "id": 50153536,
      "author": "t-3",
      "text": "I doubt much will be merged upstream. Many updates we have can technically run on other OSes ...",
      "createdAt": "2026-10-19T15:20:01Z",
      "replies": 1
    }
  ]
}

A comment from a search has storyId, storyTitle, storyUrl and parentId instead of the story fields. rank is set only for live lists. topComments is there only when you ask for it.

Pricing

Pay per result: $2.00 per 1,000 results. A story with its top comments counts as one result. You can set a spending limit on any run, and the run stops cleanly when it's reached.

Good to know

• Search covers all of Hacker News history (since 2007). Algolia returns at most 1,000 results for one search, so narrow it with days or minimum points if you need more.
• Live lists hold up to 500 stories (top, new, best) or 200 (Ask, Show, jobs).
• No personal contact data. Email addresses and phone numbers are removed from post and comment text. Usernames are kept, because they're how Hacker News identifies posts.
• Deleted and flagged items are skipped.