Google announced today that they have made a small subset of public datasets searchable. Search for unemployment rate and you’ll see a thumbnail at the top of the results. Click on it, and you get a the very Google-y chart like the one above, so instead of searching for unemployment rates for multiple years, you can get it all at once.
This is an obvious move for Google as it continues in its efforts to make the world and all the data in your life searchable. It is still a very limited number of datasets at this point from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division, but I’m sure you can imagine the growth in the coming months. Maybe Google will make some real use out of Gapminder’s Trendalyzer that they purchased a couple years back. Whatever happened to the Palimpsest Project?
Check it out for yourself, or if you’re lazy, watch the video:
Data, Data, Data
The most exciting part about this isn’t the graphs or even the new searchability. It’s this growing availability of data. I think most of the data that Google will index is stuff that’s already available. You just have to know where to look. The main point here is that there’s so much data out there on the Web that Google (and Wolfram?) has found that indexing is now worth their while, and with data.gov on the way, we, as data scientists are in for some exciting times.
[via ReadWriteWeb]
“Leaked Screenshot of Wolfram”
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/28/after-being-upstaged-by-google-wolfram-alpha-fires-back-with-a-leaked-screenshot/
Competition is a good thing. If both are running off essentially the same public data then competition will focus on visualising and features.
Anyhoo, arguably besides data scientists, this is even better for the general population – seeing data helps fight around distortion through media/government (assuming it isn’t manipulated aforehand).
Btw, Nathan, did you get my email about The Guardian’s data sets. They opened them up a month or two ago I believe: http://www.guardian.co.uk/data-store
I just recently tried this new feature of Google out. I think it’s pretty cool, and very convenient. It could help with people doing serious research about unemployment, or even just feed at-home curiosities. I haven’t seen the graph thumbnail just yet though.
They don’t seem to provide a mechanism to export data data files for independent analysis (though they do include links to their sources).
Jason May’s Numbrary, at http://www.numbrary.com, provides a similar service, and with a broader swath of data sets.
@Michael – for now. it’ll be interesting to see how this affects sites like numbrary, many eyes, swivel, etc
Nice. I definitely will applaud anytime finding and plotting data gets easier.
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So far I’m not impressed with Google’s offering. Nathan’s right on the mark when he says that “availability of data” is the important aspect here. And Google doesn’t do anything here: no download, no link to the data, no analytics.
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Imagine the outcry if google announced they would restrict (non-data) search to non-copyrighted content. That’s what they are proposing to do with data. That’s ridiculous. You shouldn’t need to access the data to index it.
other problem. What you get is a curve. getting the dataset behind it is another headache. It doesn’t solve a problem, it shows off something they know how to do (charts out of tabular data, big deal).
Cool!