Importing & analyzing google search history data!¶

In this notebook you can analyze your google search history data. First, you have to request your data from google, with instructions that you can find here.

The goal is to get your data in a more usable format that what google provides when you're requesting it and be able to do some quantitative analyses yourself. And of course to get some nice plots!

All of the plots that are generated from this notebook will be saved in your Open Humans home folder, so check that out once you're done.

Step 0: Import your data from Open Humans!¶

Unless you know what you're doing I'd recommend not changing this part:

1. Retrieve your google searches from the messy .html file that you got from Google¶

Here we're simply retrieving the search queries that you made to google, and the dates when you made them

2. Keep only the essential search terms¶

Here we'll be removing stop words (common words, such as "the" / "they", etc). The goal is to keep only the most infomrative search terms, in the form of a list ('filtered_words').

3. Do some more formatting¶

Here we are extracting information about the date and time when you did your searches. Also, we're breaking down each search into unique search terms ('single_words')

4. Time to plot something!¶

Now we're ready to combine everything into a dataframe and do our very first plot! We'll be plotting the frequency of searches for the top 10 most searched terms. You can change that by modifying 'items2plot'

Not very surprisingly, my efforts to learn python clearly show here! Also, it wouldn't be too hard to guess that I'm into neuroscience, programming experiments with psychopy and mainly working with electroencephalography data and mne.

5. How do my searches evolve over the past few months?¶

Now it's time to use all the date & time information that we've been extracting. We're still keeping the top 10 search terms that we extracted in step 4, but now we're looking how each of them changes over time.

In my case I unfortunately only had google search data from November 2017. My python queries peak in January 2018, and after that they keep a rather low but steady pace. Maybe I did learn something after all!

6. How do my searches change throughout the day?¶

Going back to the time information that we extracted, you can now group the top search terms by the hour of the day when you searched for them.

I'd say that I'm an python evening kind of person...

7. Zooming into specific search terms¶

Here you can choose specific terms from your searches and see how these evolve over time of the day. You can add your own search terms in the first line of this cell ('my_favourite_searches'). For this we normalize each time course by the total number of searches for a specific term.

In my case, after figuring out that I'm doing most of my python searches in the evening, I wanted to see whether my R or matlab schedules are any different. It looks like I'm mostly searching for help with R earlier in the day compared to python or matlab...

8. Google searches as a network¶

Now you can visualize your searches within a network. Here you can see whether some of your search terms tend to co-occur with others, and in which frequency. The first step for this analysis is to create a graph object containing all search terms.

9. How are my search terms connected?¶

Time to visualize the connections among the top search terms! For display we're only keeping searches that appear more than 40 times, and are connected with at least 5 other search terms.