Embeddable Google Trends Gadget

Google Trends is a great tool to see interests the Internet population based upon the keywords they are using to perform a Google search.

Today, Google has released an embeddable version of the Google Trends chart. The gadget can be used to track any search phrase and you can publish it on your web-page.

Take a look at this trends gadget that compares the interestingness of Obama to Bush.

And here are some more interesting trend graphs

Popularity of programming languages (.Net, Java, C#, C, C++)

Popularity of online mapping tools (Google Maps, Live Maps, MapQuest, Yahoo Maps) as well as interest in Maps and GIS.

(weird that Live Maps has such a low popularity. I tried MSN Maps, Microsoft Maps, MSN Live Maps, and they all gave me pretty much the same graph when compared to Google Maps

I really like this new Google Trends Gadget. I only wish that they also added the ability to show the trends as it looked at a certain point in time. (Currently the gadget will update itself everytime its loaded. Sometimes it would be nice to show how the data looked on a given date).

Get yours at : http://www.google.com/landing/trendsgadget/

Unfortunately at the time of the writing of this blog (05.06.2009), the trends gadget page had a bug and you could not create a new trend gadget directly using the web-page. I had to hack the HTML to create the three trends graph shown above. Here is what you need to know to hack it your self.

Copy the following code:

<iframe src="http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://www.google.com/ig/modules/trends_gadget.xml&amp;
source=imag&amp;
up_is_init=true&amp;
up_cur_term=Obama,Bush&amp;
up_date=mtd&amp;up_region=US" 
style="border:1px solid #ccc; padding:10px;" width="330" height="250" frameborder="0" scrolling="no">
</iframe>

Update the following parameters in the above code to personalize the Google Trends Gadget:

• up_cur_term: comma separated list of terms to use in the trends. Use + for a space. (eg: Pizza Hut, Dominos –> Pizza+hut,Dominos)
• up_date:
• mtd – 1 month,
• ytd – year to date,
• all – max