Patrick Purdy
experience | interaction | design
about me
portfolio
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Mobile Music Player
Wedding Vows Mobile App
Zeitgeist
Saving The News
Microsoft Studio
Uniquity
bullsmadtown.com
As a personal project, I wanted to learn more about what people were searching for on the internet and then see if there was a way to visualize the information in a compelling way.

I wrote a program that gathers the most recent information from different sources online, then displays it in the form of text and a related picture on screen. The user can then interact with the search term in order to learn more about recent activity including if it has become more or less popular over the last hour.

Download Zeitgeist
The first challenge was to locate a way to acquire search query information in a format that was usable and accurate. After examining several different search engine resources I decided on Google Hot Trends, an RSS feed providing the top 20 search terms in the United States from the last hour.

I also felt that incorporating pictures would be important as a means to help people to see what was going on. Examining Flickr, Yahoo, Google Images and others, I decided to use Google Images. This is again because of Google's overwhelming size and the large number of images available for use.
Beyond simply providing an ordered list of search terms, I also wanted to use image size and trend "Hotness" to communicate the popularity. Hotness represents the trends popularity in the last hour, including how many places it has risen or fallen. The most searched for term would be displayed using the largest image. Each subsequent term would be shown using an image that was smaller than the previous.

To make the interface appear as alive as the ever changing search term list, I decided to animate the images, showing them flowing from left to right across the screen.
The final program was written in Java. The Google Hot Trends RSS feed provided search terms and Google Images was used as my image source provider. Occasionally the Google Images safe search filter prevented the most relevant images from being utilized. To account for this I allowed the user to toggle the filter on and off.

The challenge of gathering pictures from the web involved returned images not actually being usable files. This program checks, in sequence as it gathers data, each delivered "image" and verifies if a file is usable.
Written over the course of 55 hours, my solution queries Google for both the most popular search terms in the last hour as well as images to accompany them. These are then displayed as an interactive visualization providing the user with each search terms popularity, movement up or down the list in the last hour and the most relevant image.

By showing the search terms as interactive images without including news articles, the solution creates a great deal of curiosity. The next step with this project will be to provide context about why people are currently searching with these terms.
Zeitgeist gathers live data every time it is launched
Google Hot Trends provides the latest information regarding popular search terms
Initial design experiment showing a way to display trends and images separately
 
Final wireframe design
Written in Java, the final program is over 1000 lines of code
(Click play to start movie)
© Patrick Purdy 2011
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