Google now searches public data | Hacker News Reader

Google now searches public data

googleblog.blogspot.com

26 pointscoglethorpe5 comments

The interesting thing about that post was this bit: "Since Google's acquisition of Trendalyzer two years ago, we have been working on creating a new service that make lots of data instantly available for intuitive, visual exploration. Today's launch is a first step in that direction."

It would be great to see Trendalyzer hooked up to google's data-crawling capability.

Very nice. Particularly since it gives me insight into what lots of people are yelling about.

For example, look at the unemployment rate, and click Alaska (where I live) & California (where half the web seems to think that everyone lives).

We see that employment in AK is highly cyclic with a yearly cycle, that there isn't a whole lot of variation otherwise, and that current unemployment is a tad high, but not outlandishly so, and not the highest in the last 20 years.

On the other hand, unemployment in CA in not very cyclic, has significant variation on a scale of 5-10 years, and has recently gone shooting up to the highest level in 20 years.

So perhaps both sides can understand each other a little better.

P.S. Also compare California and Wyoming. And then stop wondering why some of the people in Wyoming don't seem worried.

Maybe I'm just behind-the-times... does it bother anyone else that so many major corporations (e.g. Google) use flash as integral components of their web apps? Especially when all the functionality could be done with some combination of non-proprietary technologies (js, html, css, svg, etc).

I understand that SWF is technically open but no Flash-comparable implementations exist (gnash, ha!).

It bothers me too, but I'm happy to see the trend going against it. Apple were one of the first to take a stand on this (possibly for iPhone reasons or to better promote Webkit). Google seems to be putting a lot of weight behind SVG (with VML fallbacks for IE) but obviously that's not reflected everywhere.

Much easier to find the statistics you are looking for. It is annoying trying to navigate government websites, and having it all available on Google just seems like a good step in making these statistics more usable.

Does anyone know if you have to search for each individual public data type (IE: "Unemployment Rate"), or is there a single list of everything Google has indexed?

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