Discovering Trends

circles Use the globe to select a country, then type in a search word to see if it has been trending. Or make a global search and the countries will light up based on the popularity of the word

The intention for this project was to create a single page web experience that uses data from a public API and incorporates the use of a Javascript "interaction" library. In this case D3.js.

I used the google trends API. An API that allows you to explore the most popular google searches and trending buzzwords in different countries. The API has been collecting data since 2004 giving you the option to choose specific timepoints if you are interested in certain time periods. Also, when typing a searchword another feature to the API returns a global comparison showing the countries in which your searchword was more popular.

circles Searching the word: "Olympics" in Brazil returns a trend in August 2016, which is when the olympics were held

The google trends library is available through Node.js. For this project I set up a server using Digitalocean and created a cloud server (droplet) from which I could serve my content. I used Fetch for file transfer and updates to the server.

The Globe was created using D3.js based on an example from Mike Bostock. The data is visualized using Chart.js and user interaction inputs/buttons were made using jQuery.

More information about the project can be found in my blogpost. The code used in the project can be found on Github.