How to Export Data From Google Ngram Viewer

By Johannes Filter
 Published Jan 3, 2017

Google Ngram Viewers gives information about the frequency of words in Google Books. You can query for several words and the results is a graph. But they do not offer a way to export the data. To do so follow the instructions (Mac OS 10.12.2, Chrome 55):

  1. Specify the query and select a smoothing of 0. This ensures that you get the raw data that was not subjected to smoothing.
  2. Open Developer Tools.
  3. Run the query.
  4. Select the Sources panel
  5. Select “search all files” (click on the three dots to see a menu where you can select this)
  6. Search for “var data”
  7. Look in the resulting list of domains for something like “books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=long&year_start=1800…..”
  8. Copy and clean the data