I have discussed the Google Trends software quite enthusiastically on this blog before, originally here, and more recently here. Now the software has been enhanced to let users get their hands dirty with the secondary data!
Writing here on the Google Research Blog, Heej Hwang from the Google Trends team describes how the latest version of Google Trends can now be used to see how popular search terms vary across geographic regions, cities, and languages. Also, the numbers on the graph can now be downloaded to a spreadsheet. (Note: These functions are only available after you've signed in to your Google Account.)
The Trends data can be downloaded to a .csv file (a common format to import/export data), which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications (or easily converted to do so). When using the export function, there is also the choice of using either relative or fixed scaling (scaled to a specific time range). This last nuance is discussed in the post from the Google Research Blog. I look forward to seeing many interesting papers emerging from this novel data source!
2 comments:
While they’re not offering raw numbers of search terms, you can now download a spreadsheet that shows relative search frequency - to use a made-up example, that “Coke” is searched for twice as much “Pepsi,” for instance.
Thanks to http://storywelch.wordpress.com/
for the above
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