Hacker News Algolia Search by Query + Tags

Search Hacker News via the public Algolia API — the same data behind https://hn.algolia.com/. One row per hit, paginated, server-side date-filtered. Works for stories, comments, Ask HN, Show HN, polls, front page, by author, comments under a specific story.

What you get

{
  "objectID":      "37412345",
  "storyId":       "37412345",
  "title":         "Show HN: Notion-style outliner in 200 lines of JS",
  "author":        "jane_doe",
  "url":           "https://github.com/jane_doe/outliner",
  "points":        842,
  "numComments":   217,
  "createdAt":     "2026-05-30T14:23:01.000Z",
  "createdAtUnix": 1781098981,
  "tags":          ["show_hn", "story", "author_jane_doe"],
  "permalink":     "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37412345",
  "query":         "Show HN"
}

How to use

Input.

{
  "queries":            ["Show HN: AI", "Ask HN: hiring"],
  "tags":               ["story"],
  "sinceDays":          30,
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 500,
  "sortBy":             "date"
}

Tag cheat sheet. Tags are AND-ed:

• story — only stories
• comment — only comments
• front_page — currently on the front page
• show_hn, ask_hn, poll — special story types
• author_<username> — by author, e.g. author_pg
• story_<id> — all comments under a specific story

Common recipes.

• "Last 24h Show HN top voters": queries=[""], tags=["show_hn"], sinceDays=1, sortBy=date.
• "Front page right now": queries=[""], tags=["front_page"], sinceDays=1.
• "Everyone talking about Anthropic this month": queries=["Anthropic"], tags=["story", "comment"], sinceDays=30.
• "All comments under HN ID 37412345": queries=[""], tags=["story_37412345"], sinceDays=0.

Pricing

PAY_PER_EVENT · $0.0003 per story_extracted · 3 333 hits = $1.

Buyer

• Launch trackers (Show HN sentiment for week's biggest dev tools).
• Brand monitoring (every mention of your company on HN this month).
• Hiring-signal radar (Ask HN: Who is hiring? threads).
• Researchers studying HN community trends.

Source

https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search and /search_by_date — Algolia serves the entire HN index for free. No auth, no rate limit documented; this actor still paces 0.2s between pages.