What is the API for Google Ngram Viewer?

The Google Ngram Viewer shows the frequency of phrases over time. It has an API, but it’s not documented. In the Google Ngram Viewer site, if you search for the frequency of “Churchill” between 1800 and 2000, it will take you to a page at this URL:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Churchill&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=26&smoothing=3

This URL gives you an HTML page showing a chart. To turn this into an API, just replace the graph in the URL with json. For example, here’s the same query from the CLI, showing the results as JSON:

$ curl -s 'https://books.google.com/ngrams/json?content=Churchill&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=26&smoothing=3' | jq . | head
[
  {
    "ngram": "Churchill",
    "parent": "",
    "type": "NGRAM",
    "timeseries": [
      3.4028656727969064e-06,
      3.4380268971290205e-06,
      3.466722167407473e-06,
      3.4695450982066437e-06,

Thanks to Frans Badenhorst for this solution! What follows is my original solution, which is less elegant.

const fetch = require('node-fetch');

const regexp = /var data = (.*);/;

async function fetchNgram(phrases) {
  console.log("ngram(", phrases, ")");
  const params = new URLSearchParams();
  params.set('content', phrases.join(','));
  params.set('year_start', '1800');
  params.set('year_end', '2000');
  params.set('corpus', '15');  // English
  params.set('smoothing', '0');
  const response = await fetch('https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?' + params.toString());
  const responseText = await response.text();
  const match = regexp.exec(responseText);
  const json = match[1];
  return JSON.parse(json); 
}

module.exports = { fetchNgram };

Here’s an example of usage, showing the frequency of “Churchill” between 1800 and 2000:

$ node
> const ngram = require('./ngram.js');
undefined
> ngram.fetchNgram(['churchill']).then(results => console.log(results))
...
[ { ngram: 'churchill',
    type: 'NGRAM',
    timeseries:
     [ 0,
       0,
       0,
       ...
       0,
       5.409022563185317e-9,
       0,
       ... 101 more items ],
    parent: '' } ]

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