cipherdyne.org

Michael Rash, Security Researcher



Gootrude README

The purpose of the Gootrude project is to accept a set of search terms to be input into Google and graph the numeric result returned from Google over time. This allows changes in search results to be visualized graphically, and large changes can indicate significant usage of related search terms in high profile websites around the Internet. Moving averages are supported, and gnuplot is used (currently) as the graphing software. Gootrude is an open source answer to the problem where the Google Trends interface does not display search results that do not hit an internal Google popularity threshold. All information used by Gootrude is returned by Google through normal usage of the Google website - Gootrude just collects this information and graphs it over time.

Gootrude is released under the GPL as free and open source software. Please email Michael Rash (mbr[at]cipherdyne.org) with any questions or concerns.

QUICK START:

The basic deployment scenario for Gootrude on a Linux system is:

0) Gootrude requires the following software to be installed:

  • perl, and the Date::Calc CPAN module
  • wget
  • gnuplot
1) Download and extract the Gootrude source tarball within a directory, say within /home/mbr/src: 
$ cd /home/mbr/src
$ wget http://www.cipherdyne.org/gootrude/download/gootrude-0.1.tar.gz
$ tar xfz gootrude-0.1.tar.gz
2) Edit the searchterms.conf file: 
$ cd gootrude-0.1
$ vim searchterms.conf
3) Within the searchterms.conf file, add search terms that you want to trend over time accorind to the following format (with the brackets):

[search term] [type] [file]

Here are two examples in the searchterms.conf file: 
[Linux "highspeed firewalls"] [count] [Linux_highspeed_firewalls.dat]
[http://www.slashdot.org] [link] [slashdot_links.dat]
The first [Linux "highspeed firewalls"] search term is input (with quotes) into Google as a normal search (as defined by [count]), and the results will be stored in the file [Linux_highspeed_firewall.dat] (within the gootrude_plot/ directory - see the GOOTRUDE_PLOT_DIR variable in the gootrude.conf file).

The second [http://www.slashdot.org] queries Google for the number of backwards links to http://www.slashdot.org (see the [link] type) and places the results in the [slashdot_links.dat] file (also within the gootrude_plot/ directory).

All Gootrude data is stored within the gootrude_plot/ directory, and .png graphics files are also created within this directory.

4) It is recommend to run the gootrude script on a regular basis out of cron like so: 
0 1 * * * cd /home/mbr/src/gootrude && ./gootrude
This will run Gootrude once per day at 1am.