Search Hacker News with one API call

Read Hacker News — stories and comments — without building or maintaining a scraper. Official Algolia index. Same response shape as every other platform here, so one parser handles all of them. 1 credit a call.

The call

curl -H "x-api-key: $SS_KEY" \
  "https://api.socialsearchapi.com/v1/hackernews/search?query=llm+agents"

This call costs 1 credit once you are on credits. A new account gets 5 free calls on any platform — verify an email and this command runs as-is.

What comes back

A real response from this endpoint, captured on 2026-07-25 and trimmed to one item:

{
  "success": true,
  "platform": "hackernews",
  "data": {
    "total": 16736,
    "items": [
      {
        "id": "46990729",
        "platform": "hackernews",
        "type": "post",
        "title": "An AI agent published a hit piece on me",
        "text": "Previously: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.co...",
        "url": "https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/",
        "author": "scottshambaugh",
        "created_at": "2026-02-12T16:23:24Z",
        "metrics": {
          "comments": 951,
          "score": 2346
        },
        "extra": {
          "hn_url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729",
          "created_at_raw": "2026-02-12T16:23:24Z"
        }
      }
    ]
  },
  "credits_used": 1
}

Items from Hacker News carry: author, created_at, extra, id, metrics, platform, text, title, type, url.

Why not just scrape it yourself

Hacker News is the one source here that is genuinely easy to read yourself — the Algolia index is free and unauthenticated. It is included so a cross-platform query returns HN alongside everything else in the same shape, not because it is hard.

• Cost here: 1 credit a call, $0.003 at list.
• Last verified 2026-07-25: 766ms for this call.
• Coverage: Stories, comments and polls. Ranking is Algolia's, not the front page's.

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