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After searching for a word in google trends I can only get access to weekly data .csv files. How can I easily get access to monthly data ? I feel like I just missed a button or something.

I've found this stackoverflow post, which seems to work according to commentaries, but don't really know how to handle all this code (and a bit skeptical about hardcoding my google Ids...).

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note: this answer is based on another answer, with some modifications for your question.

Google Trends doesn't have an API, but you can follow instructions from this great blog post to hack it. The raw data is in JSON form here:

http://hawttrends.appspot.com/api/terms/

and using this curl command you can change date and region:

curl --data "ajax=1&geo=US&date=201310" http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts/category

This request would give you Google trends from the US in October 2013.

Output:

  • Unformatted JSON file for the above curl request - LINK.

  • Same data in a JSON formatted web tool - LINK.

If you aren't comfortable programming a tool to parse this JSON output, you can use something like OpenRefine as a front-end. With this kind of tool, I think you can convert to CSV. There are also some webtools to convert JSON to CSV (example). Note that the JSON format is for data-interchange and requires understanding the structure for proper transfer to a tabular format (like CSV). Data is stored as key/value and the values can be dictionaries, lists, or any other data-type.

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