Facebook Video Search Scraper — Keyword Video Search

The Actor searches Facebook's public video catalogue by keyword and returns the matching videos, exactly as a logged-out visitor sees them. No Facebook account, login, or session cookie is used at any point.

Accepted input

searchQuery is required and accepts a list of keywords or phrases, one per line; duplicates are collapsed before any request is made. Each term is searched separately, and every saved row records the term it came from. maxItems (default 50) bounds the number of records saved per term; 0 continues until Facebook stops returning results.

{
  "searchQuery": ["space launch", "coffee recipe"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Result fields

Each row carries query, id, title, message, url, duration, published, imageUrl, name, isVerified, and raw.

The example below illustrates field shapes; it is not captured from a live run.

{
  "query": "space launch",
  "id": "1736405456734526",
  "title": "What's Up: December 2022 Skywatching Tips from NASA",
  "message": "Lots of Moon action this month—and we don't just mean Orion's journey!",
  "url": "https://www.facebook.com/NASA/videos/1736405456734526/",
  "duration": "3:33",
  "published": "1 Dec 2022 · 20K views",
  "imageUrl": "https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t15.5256-10/...",
  "name": "NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration",
  "isVerified": true
}

published is one field, not two, because Facebook ships it as a single display label combining the date and the view count. Its wording and date format change with the locale Facebook serves the request in, so splitting it into a date column and a numeric view count would mean parsing a string whose format is not stable. The label is passed through exactly as returned; parse it yourself if your locale is consistent.

Videos search vs. a Page's video list

These are different datasets and neither replaces the other:

• This Actor searches all public videos by keyword, across every Page, and returns titles, durations, publish labels and thumbnails.
• The Facebook Videos Scraper enumerates one specific Page's video library. Facebook's logged-out Page video list returns only IDs and watch links — no titles or durations exist in that response.

If you know whose videos you want, use the Page list. If you want to find videos by topic, use this one.

Scope: videos only

Facebook's other search verticals — people, Pages, posts, groups, events, places — are not reachable without an account. Their facebook.com/search/... pages return 404 to logged-out clients, verified against both a plain HTTP client and a real browser. Only the video vertical serves public results, so this Actor covers videos and does not pretend to a general Facebook search it cannot perform.

How many results a term returns

This varies a lot by term, and it is Facebook's ranking rather than a limit in the Actor. A well-defined topic like nasa returns a full page of matches per request and pages deeply; a broad conversational phrase can return only a handful in total before Facebook stops serving new ones. If a term returns less than you expected, several narrower terms will usually collect more than one broad term.

Behaviour on partial results

Each search term is a separate paginated series of requests. A term that fails is logged as a warning and skipped, and the run continues with the rest of the list. A term with no matches simply saves no rows for that term.

Public, logged-out data only

Everything returned here is visible to somebody who is not signed in to Facebook. Videos restricted to logged-in visitors are not returned, and results can vary by the region the request exits from — Facebook ranks video search regionally.

Frequently asked questions

Can I search for people, Pages or posts instead of videos? No. Those verticals are login-gated on Facebook's side; their search pages return 404 to logged-out clients. Only videos are publicly searchable.

Why is the view count inside published instead of its own column? Facebook returns one combined, locale-dependent label rather than a numeric count. Rather than parse a format that changes per locale, the label is passed through as-is.

Do results differ between runs? They can. Video search is ranked and regional, so ordering and the exact result set may shift between runs and between exit regions, in the same way they shift for a human searching twice.

Is a Facebook account or login required? No. Only what Facebook already serves to a logged-out visitor is read.

What this is useful for

Finding every public video on a topic regardless of which Page published it; tracking how a brand, product or event is being covered in video across Facebook; sourcing creator and Page leads by the subjects they actually publish on; and building topic-based video monitoring that a per-Page enumeration cannot reach.