A week or so ago I saw a tweet related how the NFL lockout was affecting the search traffic for “fantasy football” on Google (using Google Trends).  Basically, the search traffic (properly normalized on Google Trends) was down prior to the end of the lockout.  I decided to explore a bit with this myself and chose to look into the RGoogleTrends package for R.  The RGoogleTrends package is basically a convenient way to interact with the Google Trends API using R.  Very cool stuff.  All of my code can be found at my GoogleTrends repo on github.

My first query was to pull the google trends data for the past seven or so years using the search term “fantasy football”.  The following figure shows the results over time.  It’s immediately obvious that the normalized search scores for “fantasy football” were on the decline (2011 over previous years) prior to the end of the lockout; however, it appears that interest has since recovered.

I then decided to look at the trends for “NFL”.  There isn’t a dramatic decrease in the (normalized) searches for “NFL” prior to the lockout’s end, but you do see a huge spike in searches after the announcement.

A few notes:

• It would be interesting to align the curves in the last plot by the day of week.  That is, it would be nice to compare the trends scores, as an example, for the 7th Wednesday prior to the start of the NFL preseason or something.
• In order to use the RGoogleTrends package, you can use the cookies in Firefox to pass username and password if you just log into gmail (or another google service).