Atlas – a platform for charts and data

Our team at Graphiq has been working on a similar tool for publishers and consumers to quickly find visualizations. One differentiator from Atlas is that many of our charts are dynamically generated on the fly based on the search query–for example, "usa vs india gdp", "population of the country with the tallest building", "obama vs clinton approval rating". You can try it out here: https://www.graphiq.com/search

What an odd front page. "Type to search", with no indication of what to search for. I typed in 4 searches, got "No results found" for all of them. Strange.

This is not a thing like Wolfram Alpha. It appears to be a searchable index of charts/data from Quartz (QZ.com) and partners (like sponsor GE). Note that T&C in registration goes to QZ.com (http://qz.com/about/terms-conditions/) .

Can someone who upvoted comment on what this is supposed to do? I searched `car sales in Europe` and the first chart I got is `new startups valued at 1bn or more`

Other things called Atlas:

HashiCorp's Enterprise Suite - https://www.hashicorp.com/#products

Stripe's startup tools - https://stripe.com/atlas

Netflix's Telemetry Platform - http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/12/introducing-atlas-netfli...

O’Reilly's learning environment - http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/

Boston Dynamics's Robot - http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_Atlas.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY

Did I miss any?

The design is nice enough, but the UX is awful, and pretty much for only one reason: search.

It seems to be a site listing charts, stats, data. Scrolling down or using the "Explore" nav item top-left works fine for browsing.

Search seems to be a secondary feature that is a simple keyword search on site content (the kind of site search that's usually subtle and off to one side), as opposed to a deliberately designed and targeted search on specific content facets. For some odd reason some designer has thought this should be front and centre despite being not a very good way to find anything specific. Adding the following CSS rule would massively improve the site:

  .hero .search-container { display: none; }

Otherwise, it seems nicely put together

Forgive me, but why has this story received so many upvotes? As others have mentioned, the front page provides no example of what to search for, and once I finally got a few results, they were less than interesting. Maybe I'm just not the target audience? Is there actually a need for this?

Fantastic, a searchable collection of graphs that take specialists from the media can misinterpret.

What are the terms on these? Is the idea that someone could use these as citation in a presentation or paper?

And not sure given the page what I should be searching for? I only guessed businesses, because Quartz, but the search for Apple offered odd results.

No tutorial for first time visitors is kind of a fail. When a search fails, there should be a message stating something like "why don't you try searching for X".

I wonder how lucrative the partnership with GE is / will be.

As a user interested in the future of digital economic models, I would love it if this sort arrangement makes the service viable...

The sponsorships is cleanly integrated and both entities' purposes seem to overlap (i.e., the ads are native...i.e., GE is showing charts like the rest of the site, not banner ads).

While this is nifty idea, the execution is a bit off. More troubling is the shocking misrepresentation of much of the data.

Take the Diamond Cutters graph [1] where the Y-axis includes US, Namibia and "East Asia". Did "diamond cutters per capita per country" not show the the intended conclusion? This trend persists through many of the graphs i've clicked on.

1. https://www.theatlas.com/charts/EJJSh2f6e

Is this a library? Or some kind of data service? How does this compare to http://www.highcharts.com/ ?

Tried to register but got a cryptic "Unable to register using that email address and username". Tried several combinations with no luck. I think it is in some sort of closed beta.

Being able to quickly generate a good looking chart that intelligently picks ranges, min, max, etc. and share it with a public URL seems nifty. Are there other similar services that have a pain-free way of doing this sans google sheets?

Why is this interesting, when the charts all lack clear data sources?

Numbers without context are meaningless.

US birth rate gives about 10 completely unrelated charts.

https://www.theatlas.com/search/us%20birth%20rate

This isn't new either, was shared a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9763980

If you try to register and get this error about invalid username and password, then try disabling your ad blocker (it worked for me that way).

I searched for [oranges] and got a mix of fruit juice and prison inmate statistics. What kind of fuzzy matching is going on here?

I'm heartened to see a distinct lack of 'donut' charts, the scourge of the infographic world.

Do you have support for logarithmic charts?

Some of those top examples would benefit greatly from a logarithmic Y-axis.

Not really a "platform". It's just charts and graphs from QZ.

Good idea, but search isn't great

sorry if i dont understand here but is this basically gist for charts ?

searching for `usa gdp` showed charts for everything other than usa gdp