Network chart of board members in Helsinki

The data is scraped from the Finnish business directory finder.fi. The network chart is created using D3.js.

Scraping Google Trends with R

These R functions will allow you to programmatically download Google Trends data and importing it to R.

Step 1: Install the Google Trends functions from my Github account.
Step 2: Sign in to Google Trends in your main browser
Step 3: define the keywords you need

keywords=c("Samsung", "Apple", "Xiaomi")

Step 4: create list of URL:s (in this example, we'll have only one URL)

url=URL_GT(keywords)

Step 5: specify your browser download directory and set it as your working directory

downloadDir="C:/downloads"
setwd(downloadDir)

Step 6: download the csv:s. The function outputs the file name.

filePath=downloadGT(url, downloadDir)

Step 7: import the csv to R

googletrends_data=readGT(filePath)

In this post, I write about how to merge daily data from Google Trends into longer time series using R.