How to Visualize Google Search Results

You can use InfraNodus text network analysis tool to visualize Google search results in order to better understand a certain topic.

A quick way to do that is to use the Google app in InfraNodus apps:

Step 1: Just open the Google app, type in your search query, choose the language, and have the results visualized as a graph.

Note, that you can use standard Google's search operators like site:cnn.com to only search through a certain website or after:2021-04-21 to only see the results after the 21st of April 2021. You can also exclude search terms with a minus (-) sign and use double quotes to search for specific phrases. 

Step 2: The top 40 search results will then be processed: the words will be represented as the nodes and their co-occurrences as the connections.

Step 3: This representation will let you see which words tend to co-occur together in the same context (we call them topical clusters - indicated with a specific color) as well as the most influential words (bigger on the graph): the terms that appear most often connecting the different topics together. This statistics is also visible in the Analytics panel.

Step 4: Open the Insight panel to see the structural gap — topics that could be connected but are not yet — this could indicate a potentially interesting topic to integrate into the existing Google discourse.

If you would like more control over the import options, use the Advanced Google Import App:

You will then open the advanced Google import page where there are several settings available, allowing you to specify the search query, the search results language, the country for which you want to see the search results, and other types of settings:

Possible settings:

1. Choose the search query you're interested in.

Note, that you can use advanced Google search operators in your query, such as site:cnn.com to filter results by a specific website or after:2021-04-21 for results after the 21st of April 2021 (format: yyyy-mm-dd), as well as the minus to exclude a keyword and quotes for specifying a search phrase.

For instance, if you want to find all the news about Joe Biden but to exclude any mention of trump between 1st of January 2020 and 31st of December 2020 on cnn.com website you'd use the following query:

2. You can choose more precisely the location that you're interested in (Google search results are different in US and UK, for example), as well as the language:

3. You can also choose to exclude the search terms from the graph and also exclude the page titles (so only the page excerpt chosen by Google are taken in account). This latter option can be helpful if you are more interested in the surrounding context rather than the search terms themselves.

Once you visualize the graph, you can use the various approaches we propose to analyze and interpret the results. Read more in our article on Interpreting Text Network Graphs.

To get an overview of this workflow in action, watch the video below:

If you are interested in more advanced search engine optimization approaches. For example, finding a free content niche, check out our help article on SEO using graphs.