Global News Archive Search

Search historical news articles from a Supabase-powered news archive by country, website, and published date. This Apify Actor is built for fast article retrieval, result estimation, and cursor-based pagination without running a live scrape during the Actor run.

What this Actor does

• Searches archived news articles already stored in Supabase
• Filters results by countries or websites
• Filters results by published_from and published_to
• Supports estimate_only so you can check result size before fetching rows
• Returns article data to the default Apify dataset
• Supports continuation tokens for paging through large result sets

What this Actor does not do

• It does not scrape websites live during the run
• It does not open browsers or crawl pages on demand
• It only returns data that already exists in the underlying archive

Best use cases

• News monitoring
• Media intelligence
• Historical article lookup
• Research workflows
• Data enrichment pipelines
• Country-level or source-level article exports

Quick start

1. Choose countries or websites
2. Set your date range
3. Turn on estimate_only if you want a count first
4. Run the Actor
5. Read rows from the dataset and paging info from OUTPUT

Simple input examples

Search by country

{
  "countries": ["Africa"],
  "published_from": "1000 days",
  "published_to": "0 days",
  "max_results": 100
}

Search by website

{
  "websites": ["Reuters", "AP News"],
  "published_from": "2025-01-01",
  "published_to": "2025-12-31",
  "max_results": 100
}

Estimate results first

{
  "countries": ["United States"],
  "published_from": "30 days",
  "published_to": "0 days",
  "estimate_only": true,
  "max_results": 500
}

Continue to the next page

{
  "countries": ["Africa"],
  "published_from": "1000 days",
  "published_to": "0 days",
  "max_results": 100,
  "continuation_token": "{\"date_published\":\"2026-05-06T15:44:00+00:00\",\"url_hash\":\"81a489c65af24950956dd717c2f7b4be\"}"
}

Input guide

Field	Type	Required	How it works
countries	string[]	No	Search by one or more countries. Use this or websites, not both.
websites	string[]	No	Search by one or more source names. Use this or countries, not both.
published_from	string	No	Start of the date range. Supports ISO dates like 2025-01-01 and relative dates like 30 days.
published_to	string	No	End of the date range. Supports ISO dates like 2025-12-31 and relative dates like 0 days.
estimate_only	boolean	No	If true, the Actor returns a count estimate and no article rows.
max_results	integer	No	Maximum number of rows to return. Default is 10. Maximum is 5000.
continuation_token	string	No	Use the token from the previous run to fetch the next page.

Helpful defaults

• If you provide neither countries nor websites, the Actor defaults to AP News
• If you provide no dates, the Actor defaults to the last 10 days
• If you provide only published_from, published_to defaults to 0 days
• If you provide only published_to, published_from is derived automatically

Date format examples

• 2025-01-01
• 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z
• 7 days
• 30 days
• 12 months
• 2 years

Output

Article rows are pushed to the default Apify dataset.

Common dataset fields:

• site_name
• country
• region
• language
• article_title
• author
• article_body
• tags
• date_published
• article_url
• main_image_url
• seo_description

Example dataset item:

{
  "site_name": "Africa News",
  "country": "Africa",
  "region": "Western Africa | Eastern Africa | Southern Africa | Middle Africa | Northern Africa",
  "language": "en|fr",
  "article_title": "Trump hosts Dutch royals at the White House for dinner and overnight stay | Africanews",
  "author": null,
  "article_body": "Normalized article text...",
  "tags": [],
  "date_published": "2026-05-06T16:13:00+00:00",
  "article_url": "https://www.euronews.com/2026/04/14/trump-hosts-dutch-royals-at-the-white-house-for-dinner-and-overnight-stay",
  "main_image_url": null,
  "seo_description": null
}

OUTPUT record

Each run also writes a lightweight OUTPUT record with summary metadata.

Typical fields:

• resultCount
• hasMore
• nextContinuationToken
• filters
• estimatedMatchCount in estimate mode
• estimatedReturnedThisRun in estimate mode

Estimate mode

Use estimate_only: true when you want to see how many articles match before pulling rows.

In estimate mode:

• no dataset rows are returned
• the OUTPUT record includes the estimated match count
• you can rerun the same input with estimate_only: false to fetch rows

Pagination

When hasMore is true, the OUTPUT record includes nextContinuationToken.

To fetch the next page:

1. Copy nextContinuationToken from OUTPUT
2. Use the same filters again
3. Paste the token into continuation_token
4. Run the Actor again

Why you might get zero results

• The archive does not currently contain matching rows
• The country or website filter is too narrow
• The date range is too small
• You requested a page beyond the available results

Production notes

• The Actor is optimized for archive retrieval, not live crawling
• Default run memory is 128 MB
• Results are returned newest first
• The Actor is suitable for production use when your Supabase archive is populated and DATABASE_URL is configured correctly