Migrating from ScrapingBee

Use this guide to replace news searches and supported news-article requests from ScrapingBee. APITube does not replace general web scraping.

The mappings cover Google Search API requests with search_type=news and article requests for publishers covered by APITube.

Why use APITube for news collection?

	ScrapingBee	APITube
Article text	One fetch per article, then your extraction rules	body and body_html in the same response
Per request	One page	Up to 250 articles (10 on Free, 50 on Starter, 200 on Basic)
Cost model	Credits per request: 1 without JS, 5 with, 10–25 premium proxy, 75 stealth, 15 for a Google search	No per-request credit
Discovery	RSS parsing, sitemap crawling, or SERP scraping	Search for articles with API filters
Extraction	Per-publisher selectors that break on redesigns	Structured fields
Article details	Yours to build	Entities, sentiment, IPTC categories, topics, industries, readability, publisher bias

ScrapingBee credit costs depend on options such as render_js and premium_proxy. See ScrapingBee's knowledge base.

APITube returns article text with the search results, so you do not need a separate fetch request for every article.

Your first request

# ScrapingBee
curl "https://app.scrapingbee.com/api/v1/store/google?search=tesla&search_type=news&country_code=us" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY"

# APITube
curl "https://api.apitube.io/v1/news/everything?title=tesla&source.country.code=us" \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Parameter mapping

ScrapingBee	APITube	Note
search	title, query, source.domain, published_at.*	Google operators split into separate parameters
search_type=news	—	Endpoint choice. The other seven values have no equivalent
country_code	source.country.code	Proxy country → publisher country. uk must become gb
extra_params[hl]	language.code	Two letters only; en-US returns 400 ER0061
extra_params[gl]	source.country.code	Same caveat as country_code
extra_params[num]	per_page	Max 250; 10 on Free, 50 on Starter, 200 on Basic
extra_params[start]	page	Offset → page number
extra_params[tbs]	published_at.start / .end	Write the bound explicitly
url	—	No URL lookup exists — see below
extract_rules	title, body, published_at, author.name, image	The fields are already there
render_js, premium_proxy, wait*, block_*	—	Not needed: the API returns article content directly
js_scenario, screenshot*, cookies, session_id	—	Keep ScrapingBee

Operators inside search: site: → source.domain, -site: → ignore.source.domain, when:7d → published_at.start=NOW-7d, -term → ignore.title, intitle: needs no equivalent because APITube already searches only headlines. inurl: has no equivalent.

URL lookup is not supported

There is no URL lookup, and the obvious parameter names fail silently.

curl "https://api.apitube.io/v1/news/count?api_key=YOUR_API_KEY&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticles%2Fc8dng1v72lno"
# {"count":3050326333}   ← the entire index

APITube does not support URL lookup with href=, url=, article.href= or link=. These parameters may be ignored while the request returns 200. Search by topic, entity or publisher instead.

Tasks that still need ScrapingBee

• Sites that are not news publishers — competitor pages, government portals, forums, e-commerce
• Anything behind a login (cookies, session_id)
• Anything interactive (js_scenario — consent walls, "load more", pagination)
• Screenshots
• Extracting specific elements from a web page's HTML
• Fetching one specific URL

Keep ScrapingBee for these tasks. The migration kit lists them in reference/what-you-keep-scraping.md.

Check your domains first

curl "https://api.apitube.io/v1/news/count?api_key=YOUR_API_KEY&source.domain=example.com"

A count request can return a positive count, {"count": 0} with HTTP 200, or 400 ER0214 for an unknown source. Check the count as well as the status to confirm coverage.

Other migration differences to check

Search is headlines-only. No body-text parameter. Filter on organization.name instead of a keyword, or filter the returned body locally.

NOW-30m means thirty months. APITube reads m as months. NOW-1h, NOW-7d and NOW-1y behave as expected; there is no minutes unit.

Wildcards return everything. title=immuni* gives 200 and the whole index. Expand into query=title:(immunity OR immunization OR immunology).

Unknown parameters are ignored. A forwarded search= or render_js= produces a successful-looking response with the query unfiltered.

What you gain

APITube returns article text, entities with per-entity sentiment, separate title and body sentiment, categories, topics, industries, publisher details and readability scores. Responses also include is_duplicate and story.id, and support eight export formats.

Next steps

• scrapingbee-apitube-migration-kit — news search and article request mappings, a list of tasks that still need scraping, and Node.js and Python compatibility libraries (73 tests, identical output). Includes an AI prompt that flags requests it cannot convert.
• Parameters reference
• Common migration issues