KUkuzdogan·May 15, 2021
Hi HN!
Google Trends is underrated. This huge search engine is somewhat a projection of what the public has on their minds at a given time.
However, Trends have no API and it's not easy enough to go check trends regularly. You have to remind yourself to go to Trends website, choose your country etc.
Twitter is the perfect platform to have this. I've made a network of Twitter bots for sharing the Trends of each country 3 times a day. It works for 13+ countries (check Following) right now. The bot first posts a generated image of 20 trending topics and headlines. Then lists the trending topics, and if the account has enough followers it posts one related news link for each topic.
I had to dispose several accounts as they got marked as spam, and once that happens there is no going back... That's why I first start with an image and the list o
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f trends as tweets first, then enable links once there's a decent follower base (around +100). It was difficult but interesting in hindsight trying to escape Twitter's spam filter. I needed an SMS number for each account. Thankfully there are services giving you burner SMS numbers starting $0.05 . Just need to get lucky they won't ask the number twice.
Technically it's a simple node.js script running on Google Cloud Functions. The function is triggered every hour and it checks the current time of countries. If it matches it retrieves the trends using https://github.com/pat310/google-trends-api package, generates the trends image and posts tweets one by one.
The setup is fragile. The google-trends-api package seems to use an academic API for Trends and can be shut down any time. Also Twitter is strict about bots (forbidden according to terms) and might shut the accounts down anytime. Anyways, it was fun to build it and now it's quite easy to kickstart a Twitter bot
Looking forward for your comments and feedbacks! Also let me know if you have any idea how I can spread it more.