Google Now Charts Unemployment And Other Public Data In Search Results

techcrunch.com

15 points·vaksel··9 comments

Techcrunch blogspam. Direct link:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/adding-search-power-t...

Hmm, strange. This doesn't seem to work @ my google. I just get normal search results... Might not have propagated between servers or maybe this is a localized service only available in the U.S. ?

Since it's US-specific data, perhaps Google only made this available for US search queries.

Interesting that they released this on the same day as the long-awaited Wolfram|Alpha demo...

Google has been slowly piecing together their linked data strategy, which includes things like automatically returning flight data, stock data, answers to natural-language questions, etc. However, until they release an API letting developers tap into some of these tools and return structured data, they're not fully getting it.

I went and played with the feature and I have to say that it is fairly well implemented. Kudos to Google.

Is this the first swipe at Wolfram Alpha?

Google and Wolfram don't really compete, I wouldn't be surprised if Google ends up showing Wolfram stuff in their results, like they do with Wiki.

Why would anyone downmod this? It's certainly not abusive, and it's a good point to boot: there are some definite similarities between what Wolfram Alpha is promising and the semantic technologies Google has been implementing over the past year or two.

It's based on the Trendalyzer acquisition from a few years ago. It's not like the technology was just thrown together in response to the Wolfram announcement.

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