Hacker News Search & Monitor 🔎

Search and monitor Hacker News — stories, comments, Ask HN, Show HN, jobs, polls, and users — and get clean, structured JSON. No login, no API key, no proxies required. Built on the free official Algolia HN Search index, so it's fast and reliable.

Use it to track mentions of your company, product, or competitors, find Show HN / Ask HN discussions, monitor a topic over time, or build a Hacker News dataset for research and LLM pipelines.

What you can do

• 🔍 Keyword search across all of Hacker News (titles, self-text, and comments)
• 🆕 Monitor by date — get the most recent matching items first, perfect for alerts and brand monitoring
• 🎯 Filter by content type (story, comment, Ask HN, Show HN, job, poll), minimum points, minimum comments, author, and date range
• 🧹 Clean output — one tidy record per item with direct links to both the source URL and the HN discussion
• ⚡ Fast & lightweight — pure API, no headless browser

Example use cases

• Brand / competitor monitoring: search your company name sorted by date, schedule it daily, and pipe new mentions to Slack, email, or a sheet.
• Lead & trend research: find the highest-scoring stories about a technology or market in a date window.
• Show HN / Ask HN discovery: surface new launches or questions in your niche.
• Datasets for AI: pull thousands of HN comments on a topic for sentiment analysis or RAG.

Input

Field	Description
Search query	Keyword(s) to search for. Leave empty to fetch the latest items by date (feed monitoring).
Content type	Stories, Comments, Ask HN, Show HN, Polls, Jobs, or All.
Sort by	Relevance (points & comments) or Date (most recent first).
Maximum items	Total items to return; paginates automatically.
Minimum points / comments	Only return stories above a threshold.
Author	Restrict to a single HN username.
Created after / before	Date range filter (YYYY-MM-DD).
Include full text	Include comment/self-post body text, or keep it metadata-only.

Output

Each item is returned as a record like this:

{
  "id": "48126840",
  "type": "story",
  "title": "A Great Essay",
  "url": "https://example.com/essay",
  "author": "pg",
  "points": 412,
  "numComments": 233,
  "createdAt": "2026-05-13T20:11:17Z",
  "createdAtTimestamp": 1778703077,
  "storyId": 48126840,
  "hnUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126840",
  "authorUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg",
  "text": null
}

Export to JSON, CSV, or Excel, or pull results via the Apify API. Connect to Slack, Google Sheets, Zapier, or Make for automated monitoring.

How it works

This actor queries the public Algolia Hacker News Search API (hn.algolia.com/api/v1), the same index that powers HN's own search. It paginates through results, applies your filters server-side where possible, normalizes every item into a consistent schema, and stores it in your dataset. It does not require — and never asks for — any credentials.

Notes

• This actor accesses only publicly available Hacker News data via a free public API. It is an independent tool and is not affiliated with Y Combinator or Hacker News.
• Algolia caps results at the most recent/relevant matches per query; for very large historical pulls, narrow by date range and run in windows.