Reading Google Trends time series data with Python

Question

I'm trying to read the following URL into Python:

http://www.google.com/trends/fetchComponent?q=nepal&cid=TIMESERIES_GRAPH_0&export=3

with the code:

trend_url = 'http://www.google.com/trends/fetchComponent?q=nepal&cid=TIMESERIES_GRAPH_0&export=3'        
response = urllib2.urlopen(trend_url)
the_page = response.read()

The resulting value of the_page, for reasons that I don't understand, is an error page.

UPDATE: I think that the problem is related to some authentication issue: when I try to open the link in the browser's incognito window, it also returns an error page.

Answer 1

use requests

import requests
a = requests.get('http://www.google.com/trends/fetchComponent?q=nepal&cid=TIMESERIES_GRAPH_0&export=3')
a.text

u'// Data table response\\ngoogle.visualization.Query.setResponse({"version":" ....

---

I tested your example and it is works.

Answer 2

I think is kinda late, but I think that Google does that in order to protect their data. You have to create a web-scraping that will go to the interface put the word you want, and it will generate the page/url. That is not the same as going at first sight for the URL generated.