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

It it only me....

[vidarh]

... 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?

Re:It it only me....

[Gewalt]

I find it highly unlikely that someone who can make the page in question would not be smart enough to also understand what it is that google/trend is really doing, and as such, I choose to believe instead that the author is being intentionally deceptive.

Re:Not allowed by google

[Vectronic]

Until there was an article posted on Slashdot that is.