Python Google Trends API

EDIT: FYI PEOPLE —> I RETIRED THE REPO AT BIT BUCKET, not to panic though, dreyco676 has a version for python 3 and it is working well as of 21/10/2014. Please see https://github.com/dreyco676/pytrends.

Hi once again, slight detour but thought I should share this. I found the original code on-line and with a few tweaks, managed to get it to do what I wanted and so here it is for anyone interested in this sort of thing. In a world where large datasets are becoming ever more available to the average Joe, Google are doing their bit by allowing you to see what historic rates of search terms have occurred over a given time period, essentially allowing one to look back at what people have been thinking about. You can try this for yourself by following this link to http://www.google.co.uk/trends homepage. As an example lets say I was curious to see how often people search for the term fruit, I would get the following display.

(ARGH, since this blog is free I cannot embed the link!!) There are plenty of ways one can then analyses these forms of data whether it be sentiment indicators such as the stock market, movie hits based on search results, when are most babies born and other such seasonal traffic patterns just as some examples.

Anyway the code is simple python script and follows a simple example so check it out. It does require you to login to your Google account so that it can cache the cookies so if you don’t have one you can always get each “.csv” file you need directly from the Google Trends website posted above. EDIT 20/01/2014: You will not be able to login if you have Google additional security running, this is because you get a redirect java session that will wait for a password that is sent to you by mobile, thus the script will never know what that is and is not written in a way to accept it as input. Don’t turn your security off to use this script, thats just stupid, instead just try/make a different gmail account, sorted!!

# Download the git repo.
git clone https://github.com/dreyco676/pytrends.git
cd pytrends
./example.py

EDIT: –> As mentioned above please use the pytrends version on github. I will not be supporting mine. There is an example called example.py, run this and you sould download a search for “pizza”!

This simple example will go and grab a load of trend data provided in the python list and store each in a .csv file. You can also check out the repository directly at https://bitbucket.org/mattreid9956/google-trend-api. The formatting is such that you are returned the end of week date for the whole week and the trend value over that period, this is supposed to make life easier should one run an analysis later. One could easily modify this script to get the desired formatting, note that period in which you search will change the granularity of the time window. For instance searches for 3 months will return daily results, where as searches over a year will return the accumulated results over a given week. This is a little annoying an I don’t see why Google won’t allow daily results by default, maybe time to ask them! Watch this space…