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Trending Low-Volume Google Searches with Gootrude

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the stuff-to-play-with dept.

michaelrash writes "The Google Trends project provides some visibility into how popular search terms like 'Myspace' or '2008 Election' change over time and points out relevant news articles that create jumps in search volume. This is a handy tool, but there are many search terms that Google Trends does not display any results for. Such terms (such as 'Linux Firewalls' — with the quotes) have insufficient search volumes to display graphs according to the error message that Google Trends generates. Fair enough. Google sets an internal threshold on search volume, and this threshold could be set for reasons that range anywhere from Google Trends is still experimental to Google not wanting to provide data on how it builds its massive search index for emerging search terms. Either way, I would like a way to see search term trends that Google doesn't currently make available to me. So, I've released an open source project called 'Gootrude' to do just this. For the past year Gootrude has collected a set of low-volume search terms and interfaced with Gnuplot to visualize them."

5 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. wow by Gewalt · · Score: 2, Insightful

    wow, um...congrats I think? I mean, after you get over your pat on the back, can anyone explain why this matters?

    --
    Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
  2. It it only me.... by vidarh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... or does the author of this tool seemingly not realize that Google Trends reports volume of searches, while what he's tracking is amount of documents indexed for a search term, and that there's no basis for assuming the two are correlated in a meaningful way?

    1. Re:It it only me.... by aleph42 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Agreed, the summary is misleading, as is the comparaison (from TFA) to googletrends.

      This aside, the interest of "gootrude" is that it's not porvided by google, and so it's part of the many efforts to reverse engineer how goole comes up with his numbers.

      Specificaly, it appears from TFA that the "number of results" stated by google is a wild guess for low numbers (1,000-10,000), with very sharp variations which hint at an iterative process.

      So as I get it, it's not a tool for you and me, rather for google specialists.

      --
      Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
  3. Re:Not allowed by google by Vectronic · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Until there was an article posted on Slashdot that is.

  4. Privacy? by Temporal · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Google sets an internal threshold on search volume, and this threshold could be set for reasons that range anywhere from Google Trends is still experimental to Google not wanting to provide data on how it builds its massive search index for emerging search terms.
    Or maybe for privacy reasons? Some search queries implicitly reveal the identity of the person making them. Such queries are naturally low-volume, so refusing to show low-volume queries is an effective way to protect the privacy of the searchers.