Google Books Scraper

This Apify Actor searches the public Google Books index and returns normalized book records. It reads Google Books' own key-free Atom feed (/books/feeds/volumes) first, then the quota-gated volumes API, and only falls back to a rendered Google Books search page when neither structured source answers. Anything that is not a real book result — a stylesheet blob, Google's homepage footer, a challenge page — is rejected instead of being stored.

Input

{
  "query": "artificial intelligence",
  "maxItems": 20,
  "gl": "us",
  "hl": "en",
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"],
    "apifyProxyCountry": "US"
  }
}

The complete accepted input schema, including defaults, limits, and proxy settings, is in .actor/input_schema.json.

The proxy is part of the working configuration, not a workaround: the Google Books feed answers HTTP 500 Internal error - please retry later to a large share of requests from the Actor's own cloud address, while US exits reach it. That 500 is per exit IP — a refused IP keeps refusing — so the Actor retries with backoff and uses a fresh proxy exit on every attempt instead of repeating the request on one pinned IP. GOOGLE_SERP cannot be used because it cannot tunnel a Chromium CONNECT session.

Each record includes the title, authors, publication data, description, links, categories, rating fields when Google exposes them, query context, retrieval method, and synchronized scrape metadata. It also retains the Cloud fields for ISBN identifiers, author count, interface language, retrieval domain and index, source result count, purchase and price data, and access/viewability when the response supplies them. Atom entry URLs and update times are included only on the feed path. Optional source fields are omitted when the public response does not provide them.

The complete dataset field contract, types, and requiredness are in .actor/dataset_schema.json.

How to use

Enter a book title, author, or other search phrase in the Apify Input tab, select a market and language, and start the Actor. Review book records in the Output dataset.