Trending Low-Volume Google Searches with Gootrude

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."

Comments

Spore

[Chemisor]

Have you noticed how "spore demo" is the 77th top search? On the WHOLE INTERNET! :)

Re:Not allowed by google

[vrmlguy]

Since I'm always forgetting to log my business driving, I've got a program that uses Google maps to figure out the driving distance between various pairs of points. It uses two files, one consisting of about 250 lines like this:
    home, office, client-a, restaurant-x, client-b, home
    home, client-b, restaurant-y, client-b, home
and the other listing street addresses for everyone. I'm sure it's a big violation of Google's ToS, but it tries to play fair: it caches the distances that it discovers (e.g. so that the distance from client-b to home is only requested once), it waits one-to-two minutes between queries, and I only use it once a year at tax time when I'm calculating my business expenses.