Startpage News Scraper

Collect dedicated Startpage News results as normalized, API-ready records. The Actor accepts one search or a batch of searches, follows native news pagination, applies optional date/publisher/domain/image filters, and selects records fairly across batch queries.

The Actor extracts Startpage's structured news payload first. A DOM fallback is retained for compatible page changes. Ordinary web-search results, advertisements, error pages, and challenge pages are never stored as news records.

Input

Provide either query or queries.

{
  "queries": ["world news", "technology news"],
  "maxItems": 50,
  "maxPages": 5,
  "dateFilter": "week",
  "sortBy": "newest",
  "requireImage": false,
  "language": "english",
  "maxConcurrency": 3,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"],
    "apifyProxyCountry": "US"
  }
}

Important options:

Field	Purpose
query / queries	One search phrase or up to 20 phrases.
maxItems	Global output limit, 1–500.
maxPages	Native news pages per query, 1–10.
dateFilter	anytime, day, week, or month.
publishedAfter / publishedBefore	Optional client-side YYYY-MM-DD limits.
sortBy	relevance, newest, or oldest.
includeDomains / excludeDomains	Article-domain filters.
includePublishers / excludePublishers	Case-insensitive publisher filters.
requireImage	Keep only records with a source-provided image.
language	Startpage result-language preference.
region	Locale provenance attached to output.
maxConcurrency	Parallel query limit, 1–8 and memory-capped.
proxyConfiguration	No proxy, Apify Residential, or custom proxy URLs.

GOOGLE_SERP is not supported. It is an HTTP proxy for supported Google Search/Shopping requests, while this Actor visits Startpage through an HTTPS browser session. Use Apify Residential or custom proxies when direct access is unreliable.

The complete input contract, including defaults, filters, and limits, is in .actor/input_schema.json.

Output

Records contain only non-empty values. Core fields include:

• stable id, global position, source page, and sourcePosition
• title, canonical article url, domain, and description
• publisher, publisherDomain, publishedAt, and publishedAtRaw
• source-provided thumbnailUrl, imageUrl, sourceLogoUrl, authors, tags, and category when available
• query, queryPosition, matchedQueries, and sanitized searchUrl
• extraction provenance, locale, date filter, and scrapedAt

Example:

{
  "id": "news_...",
  "position": 1,
  "queryPosition": 1,
  "sourcePosition": 1,
  "page": 1,
  "title": "Example headline",
  "url": "https://publisher.example/article",
  "domain": "publisher.example",
  "description": "Example summary",
  "publisher": "Example Publisher",
  "publishedAt": "2026-08-30T00:00:00.000Z",
  "resultType": "news-search-result",
  "resultSource": "startpage-news-bing",
  "extractionMethod": "embedded-structured-data",
  "query": "world news",
  "matchedQueries": ["world news"],
  "language": "english",
  "country": "global",
  "sourceSearchDomain": "startpage.com",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-30T00:00:05.000Z"
}

Optional fields are omitted when the source does not provide them; the Actor does not emit null, empty strings, empty arrays, placeholders, raw responses, or signed proxy URLs.

The full dataset field schema is in .actor/dataset_schema.json.

Runtime behavior

• Sessions, stable Crawlee browser fingerprints, bounded retries, and persistent cookies are enabled.
• Images, media, and fonts are blocked only after verifying structured news extraction remains complete.
• All records are normalized, filtered, deduplicated, fairly selected, and written atomically after crawling.
• A genuine no-result search completes successfully with an empty dataset.
• CAPTCHA or unusual-traffic pages fail the run and are never stored. The Actor does not solve or bypass CAPTCHAs.

How to use

Enter one query or a batch in the Apify Input tab, choose date and publisher filters, and start the Actor. Review news records in the Output dataset.