Stack Overflow Question Search — Developer Q&A Data Export

Search and extract Stack Overflow questions with titles, scores, view counts, answer counts, tags, owner reputation, and timestamps via the Stack Exchange API. Export structured JSON without launching a browser.

What it does

The Stack Overflow Question Search actor searches questions using the Stack Exchange API (api.stackexchange.com/2.3/search/advanced). It communicates directly with the public REST API rather than rendering web pages.

Each question returned includes an HTML-decoded title, direct URL, score, view count, answer count, answered status, tags, the asker's display name and reputation, plus creation and last-activity timestamps in ISO-8601 format. Results always use the API's descending relevance ordering.

This makes the actor ideal for developer relations, competitive intelligence, technical content research, and lead generation — you can discover which questions are getting traction in your technology stack, identify active community members by reputation, and build datasets of developer pain points for product planning or content marketing.

Input parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Default	Description
searchQuery	string	✅ Yes	—	The text to search for in Stack Overflow questions. Must not be empty.
maxResults	integer	No	50	Maximum number of questions to retrieve (1–100).
tagged	string	No	—	Optional tag to filter questions (e.g. python, javascript, docker). Only questions with this tag are returned.

Output fields

Each result item pushed to the dataset contains:

Field	Type	Description
title	string	HTML-decoded question title
questionUrl	string	Direct URL to the question on stackoverflow.com
score	integer	Question score (net upvotes)
viewCount	integer	Number of times the question has been viewed
answerCount	integer	Number of answers posted on the question
isAnswered	boolean	Whether the question has an accepted or upvoted answer
tags	array of strings	Technology tags on the question (e.g. ["python", "asyncio"])
ownerName	string	Display name of the user who asked the question
ownerReputation	integer	Reputation score of the question asker at time of query
createdAt	string	ISO-8601 timestamp of when the question was posted
lastActivityDate	string	ISO-8601 timestamp of the most recent activity on the question

Use cases

• Developer relations — find unanswered questions about your product or API to respond to proactively
• Content marketing — identify trending questions in your technology niche to write blog posts, tutorials, or documentation that address real developer needs
• Lead generation — discover active, high-reputation developers by their questions for recruiting or community outreach
• Competitive intelligence — track question volume and sentiment around competing technologies or frameworks
• Product research — collect common developer pain points and recurring questions to inform your product roadmap
• Data collection — build datasets of developer Q&A for NLP, trend analysis, or knowledge base construction

How it works

The actor calls https://api.stackexchange.com/2.3/search/advanced with q, optional tagged, pagesize, site=stackoverflow, sort=relevance, and order=desc. It HTML-decodes titles and converts Unix timestamps to ISO-8601 strings before pushing the eleven documented fields to the default dataset. A valid empty API response produces no dataset items. HTTP, network, malformed-response, and JSON errors fail the run. If the API returns a backoff value, the actor logs a warning; it does not sleep or retry automatically.

Example usage

Example input

{
    "searchQuery": "async await error handling",
    "maxResults": 5,
    "tagged": "python"
}

Example output

{
    "title": "How to properly handle errors with async/await in Python",
    "questionUrl": "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78912345/how-to-properly-handle-errors-with-async-await",
    "score": 42,
    "viewCount": 15823,
    "answerCount": 3,
    "isAnswered": true,
    "tags": ["python", "asyncio", "error-handling"],
    "ownerName": "dev_user123",
    "ownerReputation": 5420,
    "createdAt": "2025-06-10T14:30:00+00:00",
    "lastActivityDate": "2025-07-01T09:15:00+00:00"
}

Pricing

This actor uses the pay-per-event (PPE) pricing model on Apify. You are charged a small fee for each successful actor run. Because the Stack Overflow Search uses a free public API and does not launch a browser, runs are extremely fast and cost-efficient — typically completing in under 5 seconds. Check the actor's Apify Store page for the current per-run pricing. Apify's free tier includes monthly platform credits that are sufficient for hundreds of searches.

Tips

• Use the tagged filter to narrow results — combining a search query with a tag like python or react ensures you get questions specific to that technology, not generic matches.
• Results use relevance ordering — sorting is fixed to relevance in descending order and is not an input option.
• Respect API backoff requests — the actor logs backoff values but does not automatically delay or retry the request.