Meetup is a goldmine of self-selected talent — people who show up after work to learn Rust, talk climate tech, or trade Kubernetes war stories. But Meetup paywalled their public API in 2019, so you can’t query it anonymously anymore. This tool gets you back in through the front door Google left open.
Enter a topic and an optional location, and you get three Google X-Ray queries scoped to site:meetup.com. One angle finds the groups themselves, one finds member profiles (inurl:/members/), and one finds organizers. Type Rust + Geneva and you’ll get a members query like site:meetup.com Rust Geneva inurl:/members/. Click “Open in Google” on whichever angle fits — the members angle when you want raw headcount, the organizers angle when you want a warm starting point.
The insider move is to start with organizers, not members. Whoever runs a city’s Rust meetup is usually one of the most senior people in that scene — they spend free time hosting it. They know who just left a company, who’s quietly looking, and who’s worth your time. Reach out to them first on a hard local role.
One honest limit: X-Ray only surfaces what Google has publicly indexed. Members who keep a thin Meetup profile, or groups that recently restructured their URLs, won’t always show up. Treat the queries as leads to chase, not a complete roster.
This tool is the discovery half of the workflow — it finds the groups. Once you’ve landed on a group you want, the Meetup Scraper exports its events’ full attendee list to CSV in one click.