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Recipes / Follow a topic in a specific language only

Follow a topic in a specific language only

/stories in semantic mode. This page is the operational half — what comes back, how it breaks, and what running it for real takes.

The request

GET /stories
  ?q=<topic, in English>
  &mode=semantic
  &language=deu
  &from=<now - 7d>

As a call you can paste:

curl -s -G "https://api.unzoi.com/stories" \
  -H "x-api-key: $UNZOI_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "q=<topic, in English>" \
  --data-urlencode "mode=semantic" \
  --data-urlencode "language=deu" \
  --data-urlencode "from=<now - 7d>"

For an agent rather than a script, the same query is the list_stories MCP tool with these as its arguments.

Parameters used here

What comes back

Coverage in that language, headlines in their original script. For industrial and trade subjects the domestic press is typically days ahead of any English summary.

Field by field: the /stories response reference.

How this goes wrong

Leaving the language filter off and assuming the topic implies the market. An unscoped query about German automotive returns mostly English-language coverage about Germany, which is a different and thinner thing.

Adapting it

Running the same English query across several language filters and comparing the results is the natural extension, and it is where this recipe earns its place: the same topic covered in three markets produces three different story lists, and the differences are the analysis. For a market with more than one working language, query each separately rather than relying on the country filter alone.

Running it for real

Semantic queries are more expensive to serve than keyword ones and the difference shows under a tight poll interval, so prefer a wider window at a lower frequency here. Where you intend to run this continuously against several languages, have a native speaker check a sample of results once at setup — the failure mode is a query that returns plausible but subtly off-target coverage, and it is not detectable from the counts.

Why this approach

The case for these parameters over the obvious alternatives — and when this recipe is the wrong tool entirely — is on the recipe's page on unzoi.com. It is kept there rather than repeated here, so the argument and the operations cannot drift apart.