instagram

Search Instagram profiles by keyword

Searches Instagram's own account search for a keyword or phrase and returns matching public profiles mapped to the unified Author schema: id, username, display_name, verified, avatar_url, and the profile url, 20 a page with a cursor for the next. A search row carries no bio, followers, following or posts_count (they are null): fetch /v1/instagram/profile for an account you keep. The plain call has no account country: Instagram does not put that on a search stub. Send include=about to join each row to the About-this-account panel for author.ext.country, the join month, and the public email and phone the account publishes, 2 extra credits a row filled, default the top 8 (17 credits held), limit=12 for the page. A row the panel could not fill is refunded. This is not a country filter: a query that surfaces no Korean accounts still returns no Korean accounts after the join. For place-tagged posts, use /v1/instagram/search/location then /v1/instagram/location/posts.

get/instagram/search/profiles

Request

  • Base URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1
  • URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/instagram/search/profiles
  • Auth: API key in header x-api-key

Query parameters

querystring required

Bio or caption keyword/phrase to search for.

cursorstring

The cursor returned by the previous response. In this version it is the next Google results page number.

include'about'

Send about to fill author.ext.country, join month and public contact from the About panel, 2 extra credits a row filled, never more than 12 rows. A typo is a free 400.

limitinteger

Cap the rows served, and with include=about the credits held. 1 to 12. Default 8 when the token is present so the hold is 17, not 25.

Headers

Cache-Controlstring

Send no-cache to bypass the response cache and force a live fetch. Billed at the normal endpoint cost; the fresh result is written back to cache for the next caller. Only the no-cache directive triggers this. See the Response Schema guide for details.

Idempotency-Keystring

Optional UUID that makes the request safely retriable. The key is reserved atomically per account before billing. A concurrent retry receives 409 IDEMPOTENCY_IN_PROGRESS with a Retry-After of 1 second while the original is young, growing to a quarter of the time it has been running (at most 30); a crashed reservation expires after 5 minutes. A replay keeps the cached payload immutable except for billing metadata: credits_used becomes 0, idempotent_replay becomes true, and credits_remaining is refreshed to the current balance. A known current balance appears in both the body and X-Credits-Remaining header; no balance row resolves to 0. On a transient lookup failure, body credits_remaining is null and X-Credits-Remaining is omitted. Completed outcomes expire after 24 hours. If the claim store is unavailable, the request fails closed before billing. GET endpoints do not combine idempotent replay with Server-Sent Events: use Accept: application/json when sending this header. The unsupported key-plus-SSE combination is rejected before billing.

Response

Successful response

successboolean required

Whether the request succeeded

platformstring required

Platform name

endpointstring required

API endpoint path

credits_usedinteger required

Number of credits consumed

credits_remaininginteger nullable required

Current account balance, or null when this response could not establish one. Free cache hits always return null because they do not establish an authoritative post-request balance. An idempotency replay also returns null when its current-balance lookup fails. It is never a fabricated zero, so a zero here means the account really is empty. The authoritative reading is the one on a billed response, which comes straight from the deduction.

request_idstring required

Unique request identifier for support

cachedboolean required

Whether the response was served from cache

idempotent_replayboolean

True only when this response is an idempotency replay

Example response

{
  "success": true,
  "platform": "instagram",
  "endpoint": "/v1/instagram/search/profiles",
  "credits_used": 1,
  "credits_remaining": 4999,
  "request_id": "req-abc123",
  "idempotent_replay": true,
  "meta": {
    "hint": {
      "code": "search_multi",
      "message": "You searched \"matcha\" on 3 platforms one call at a time; /v1/search/multi returns each platform's own search rows in one call at the same price per platform, and a platform with no rows is not charged.",
      "method": "GET",
      "path": "/v1/search/multi?query=matcha&platforms=instagram,tiktok,youtube"
    }
  },
  "pagination": {
    "next_cursor": "sc.eyJ2IjoyLCJjIjoiMiIsInAiOiJwYWdlIn0",
    "has_more": true,
    "page_size": 30,
    "stopped_at": "known_id"
  }
}

Changes

No recorded changes to this operation across all 1 revision of this API.