Serp Events Scraper

An Apify actor that scrapes professional events from Google Events using SerpAPI. It's built for daily database updates, fetching real event data across major US cities.

Overview

This actor performs searches via SerpAPI's Google Events engine. It returns actual event listings—no mock data. It's configured by default to get 40 events from each of 10 major US cities, making it suitable for scheduled daily runs to keep an events database current.

Key Features

• Real Google Events Data: Fetches live event listings directly from Google via SerpAPI.
• Multi-City Coverage: Default setup targets 10 major US cities (customizable).
• Structured Output: Returns detailed, consistent event data including title, date, venue, organizer, and links.
• Professional Focus: Searches are optimized for business, networking, and conference events.
• Scheduled Runs: Designed for reliable daily execution to update databases.

Input/Output

Input Parameters

Configure the actor run via this JSON input schema:

{
  "cities": [
    "New York", "Los Angeles", "Chicago", "San Francisco", "Miami",
    "Austin", "Seattle", "Boston", "Denver", "Atlanta"
  ],
  "eventsPerCity": 40,
  "searchKeywords": "professional networking business conference",
  "includeVirtualEvents": true
}

• cities: Array of city names to scrape.
• eventsPerCity: Number of events to fetch per city (1-100).
• searchKeywords: Terms used to filter for professional events.
• includeVirtualEvents: Boolean to include online events.

Output Format

The dataset contains items, each representing one event with the following fields:
* title, date, time
* city, location (address), venue
* organizer, description
* eventUrl, thumbnail (image URL)
* category, source ("Google Events (via SerpAPI)")
* extractedAt (ISO timestamp)

How to Use

For Daily Updates

1. Schedule the actor to run daily in Apify.
2. It will process all cities in the input, fetching the specified number of events per city.
3. Results are stored in the actor's dataset.
4. Pull the data into your system using the Apify API, webhooks, or a direct dataset export.

API Integration

Fetch the results programmatically using the Apify API:

// Example: Fetch dataset items
const response = await fetch('https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/{DATASET_ID}/items');
const events = await response.json();

Costs & Rate Limits

• SerpAPI's free tier allows 100 searches per month.
• Each city search uses 2-5 API calls, depending on pagination for the event count.
• A daily run for 10 cities (~50 calls) will exceed the free monthly limit, requiring a paid SerpAPI plan.

Built for TopEvents.ai