Reddit Keyword Search Scraper

The Actor searches Reddit by keyword and saves a structured record for every result. One of five corpora is searched per run — posts, communities, comments, people, or media — and each returns its own record shape, stated on every row in the kind field. No Reddit account, application, or API credential is involved.

Accepted input

Field	Required	Default	Notes
q	yes	—	The words to search for. Passed through as typed, so quotes and operators behave as they do in reddit.com's own search box.
searchType	no	posts	One of posts, communities, comments, people, media.
maxItems	no	100	Results to save. A search is read in one request, so the effective ceiling is 200.
cursor	no	—	A search continuation token, if one is already held from elsewhere. A run does not produce one; see below.

{
  "q": "mechanical keyboard",
  "searchType": "posts",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Response fields

The saved columns are the union of the four record shapes, and a run fills in the ones its corpus uses. Every row carries kind, id, and fullname.

• posts and media return post records: kind, id, fullname, title, permalink, author, author_id, subreddit, subreddit_id, created_at, score, comment_count, nsfw, spoiler, subreddit_nsfw, snippet, snippet_fullname, and media_url.
• communities return community records: kind, id, fullname, name, prefixed_name, url, description, weekly_visitors, weekly_contributions, icon, nsfw, and quarantined.
• comments return comment records: kind, id, fullname, post_fullname, post_title, subreddit, subreddit_id, author, permalink, created_at, body, and nsfw.
• people return account records: kind, id, fullname, name, prefixed_name, url, karma, description, and icon.

{
  "kind": "post",
  "id": "1abcdef",
  "fullname": "t3_1abcdef",
  "title": "Which switches are actually worth the money?",
  "permalink": "/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/1abcdef/which_switches/",
  "author": "example_user",
  "subreddit": "MechanicalKeyboards",
  "created_at": "2026-08-14T09:41:07.000Z",
  "score": 412,
  "comment_count": 86,
  "snippet": "…the switches are the part worth spending on…",
  "nsfw": false
}

Why search records are thinner than feed records

Reddit renders search results in a different markup from the one its feeds use, and the fields that markup does not carry are saved as null rather than filled in from elsewhere. The visible effects are worth knowing before a column is relied on:

• score and comment_count come from the counter row Reddit draws beneath a result. Media results have no counter row at all, so both are null on every row of a media search. That is the renderer, not the post.
• A comment result carries its body and the title of the post it sits on, but no parent and no depth, because search returns a result rather than a position in a thread. The Reddit Comment Tree Scraper returns those.
• snippet is Reddit's own highlighted excerpt and is present only where the match was on a comment rather than on the title.
• nsfw is stated for every search result, which is unusual — on a feed the field is often unknown. It remains tri-state in the schema because the same column is shared with feed-shaped records, and a null there means the source said nothing rather than that the record is safe for work. No NSFW filter is offered on any Actor in this family for that reason.

How deep a run goes

A search is read in a single request. Reddit ranks search results rather than paging them by id, and the position it hands back cannot be re-aimed at a list that has been trimmed to maxItems, so the Actor publishes no continuation point and prints none. maxItems is therefore the only control on depth, and its ceiling is 200. A run asking for more is answered with 200 and says so in the run log rather than quietly returning less than was asked for.

Search pages are also small — seven to fourteen results each — and they repeat across pages, so maxItems counts distinct results and a deep run does more reading than the number suggests.

The cursor field exists because the search accepts one, not because a run produces one. It is useful only to a caller who already holds a token from elsewhere; in normal use it is left empty and maxItems is raised instead.

The people corpus ends early, and that is the corpus

A people search returns one short page — a handful of accounts — and then offers nothing further. A run asking for fifty and receiving four has not failed and has not been throttled; that is all Reddit will serve for a person search. The run log says so before the request is made, so the small number is not a surprise afterwards. The other four corpora page normally.

Failures and partial results

A request that fails ends the run, and results already saved remain in the dataset. An empty result set ends the run cleanly rather than failing: a search term that matches nothing is an answer, not an error. Fields absent from a result are returned as null rather than omitted, so the column set is the same in every record.

Cost

Charging is per result saved to the dataset, plus the platform's one-off Actor start event. media and people searches are charged at the same rate as any other, and a run that saves nothing is charged for nothing beyond the start event.

Related Actors

• Reddit Subreddit Feed Scraper — reading a known community in full, rather than searching across all of them.
• Reddit Comment Tree Scraper — the whole thread behind a post found here, with depth and parent on every comment.
• Reddit Post Details Scraper — the complete record for one result, including body text and media that search does not return.

Support

Questions, bug reports, and requests for a field that is not here yet: thenetaji@proton.me.