Tracing Search Geographies with Google Trends: 6 lessons learnt

In a new article that will be presented at AGILE later this year, my colleagues Simon Scheider, Bas Spierings, and I explore the potential of Google Trends to understand how the search interest in geographic areas changes in space and time, looking at the Amsterdam metropolitan region as a case study [read the full paper … Continue reading Tracing Search Geographies with Google Trends: 6 lessons learnt →

GIS is bigger than Big Data: The battle of the buzzwords

Have you heard of hyperlocal, cloud computing, and the gig economy? Arguably, these are buzzwords used to describe things that have existed for a long time in a new, exciting way (e.g. services aimed at local markets, outsourcing computational tasks to data centres, and poorly paid, insecure jobs). Wikipedia has a nice, up-to-date list of … Continue reading GIS is bigger than Big Data: The battle of the buzzwords →

[R tool] Google Trends comparator for 5+ terms

As part of our research on the geography of search engines, we coded a new R tool, including ideas from my colleague Simon Scheider (Universiteit Utrecht). Google Trends is a great source of "big data" about search behaviour at a large scale, but it limits the number of query terms to 5. Because of the … Continue reading [R tool] Google Trends comparator for 5+ terms →