What topics or events in the news have caught the nation’s attention this year? The answers may lie in Google Insights for Search, which allows users to view and study broad search patterns across regions, categories, and timeframes. My project uses data from Google Insights on Google News search patterns in the US for the time period January - May 2009. I have chosen this topic because I feel that trends in the news can define the collective experience of the nation and shape the overarching narrative of our time. Hopefully my visualization will offer some wisdom on what the year 2009 will be remembered for.

All data used in this project was obtained from Google Insights via an API that I wrote in Python. Full documentation on Google Insights data can be found in Google Insights for Search Help.

Visualization Approach

The visualization contains three sections: top searches, top related searches, and Wikipedia. The top searches section consists of a tag cloud containing the top ten Google News search terms and a histogram of the ten terms' search volumes. The color of the tag cloud terms and the histogram bars also corresponds to the terms' search volumes. The tag cloud and the histogram are linked by color highlighting when hovered over. Clicking on a term in the tag cloud or in the histogram populates the related searches section with a similar tag cloud and histogram of the top ten Google News searches related to the term clicked on. The Wikipedia section also displays the first few paragraphs of the Wikipedia article corresponding to the term clicked on, if available.

Applet