Google Alerts sends you yesterday's news, late, with half the sources missing. If your job depends on knowing first — PR, trading, research, sales triggers — build the pipeline instead.

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The stack

  • Apify — lukaskrivka/google-search-scraper for Google News results + apify/website-content-crawler or article extractors for full text. Free monthly credits.
  • Schedule + diff — new articles only, deduped.

Step 1 — Token

Create an Apify account → Settings → Integrations → API token.

Step 2 — Google News search 

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/lukaskrivka~google-search-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "queries": "\"your company\" OR \"competitor\"", "maxPagesPerQuery": 1, "countryCode": "us", "languageCode": "en", "resultsPerPage": 50, "csvFriendlyOutput": true, "saveHtml": false, "includeUnfilteredResults": false, "mobileResults": false, "serpType": "news" }'

Step 3 — Diff → alert 

from apify_client import ApifyClient import json, os SEEN = "seen_urls.json" client = ApifyClient("APIFY_TOKEN") run = client.actor("lukaskrivka/google-search-scraper").call(run_input={ "queries": "your keyword", "maxPagesPerQuery": 1, "resultsPerPage": 50, }) seen = set(json.load(open(SEEN))) if os.path.exists(SEEN) else set() new = [] for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items(): for r in item.get("organicResults", []): if r["url"] not in seen: new.append(r); seen.add(r["url"]) for r in new: print("NEW:", r.get("title"), "|", r["url"]) json.dump(list(seen), open(SEEN, "w"))

Then enrich

Feed new URLs into apify/website-content-crawler (markdown out) → summarize with an LLM → push to Slack/Discord via webhook. Full monitoring stack for the cost of a few cents a day.

Who uses this

  • PR — brand + exec mentions, crisis detection in minutes not days.
  • Sales — "Company X raises" / "expands to" = trigger events for outreach.
  • Research — topic tracking without a $$$ media-monitoring subscription.

More tooling: awesome-web-scraping. Skills: npx skills add g4dr/apify-skills (repo).

What are you monitoring?