Google launches Google Trends API

Google announced the early release of the first API for Google Trends, known as the Google Trends API. Google Trends is a site that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages.

Daniel Waisberg and Hadas Jacobi from Google said, “Over the last years we’ve seen an increase in usage, and we received numerous requests for an API which wasn’t available until today!”

Data. The data goes back five years, as a rolling window of 1,800 days of Google Trends data. It is as recent as just 2 days ago. Google explained why they used this time frame:

“While a lot of Trends usage is around the last 12 months, we believe 5 years is important for researchers and journalists to look back at important moments such as previous elections (usually every 4 years) and sport events (for example, Olympics, World Cup).”

The data is broken down by daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly aggregations. There is also geo restriction by region and sub-region.

Use cases. Google posted a few use cases for the Google Trends API:

• Research: Developers can influence public resources allocation and scientific research priorities.
• Publishers: Use data to track topics and spot emerging trends, and use that data to tell compelling stories about the issues that matter.
• Business: Marketers and SEOs can prioritize resource investment and better develop their business’ content strategy.

Limited access. The Google Trends API will be available only to a “very limited number of testers,” Google wrote. If you’re interested in testing, apply to be an alpha tester.

Why we care. Google Trends contains a treasure trove of data that can be useful when writing content and doing analysis on topics for your website. The API may make it easier and more accessible for writers and site owners to access and leverage this data.