Google Launches “Public Data”
Although there might still be a “coming soon” box on the much-anticipated data.gov Web site, that isn’t stopping Google from getting a head start on developing new capabilities that will allow users to easily search and compare vast amounts of numbers and statistics in the public domain. Yesterday, the Internet giant announced that it will begin this endeavor with unemployment and population data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division.
This new feature will let users type in “unemployment rate” or “population” along with a specific location into a Google search and, thanks to technology the company acquired from Trenadlyzer two years ago, be able to import the data into an interactive chart. From there, users can add or subtract data from additional locations to compare. Below is a search I did that compared the unemployment rate in Pike County, Pa. (my hometown) to the overall state of Pennsylvania:
Isn’t that much better than staring at rows and columns of numbers, after first having to find them?
What is now commonly referred to as “information aesthetics” will exponentially increase the usefulness of massive amounts of government data. As Google’s Ola Rosling writes, “They did the hard work! We just made the data a bit easier to find and use.”
The White House’s E-Government and Information Technology developed something similar last year, known as VUE-IT - Visualization to Understand Expenditures in Information Technology. This platform “provides users with a drill down browsing capability to browse the list of Federal IT investments.” You can read more about it in this user guide. Though the data is more specific, the principle is the same.
Google’s launch of “Public Data” today only magnifies the possibilities and need for data.gov – a one-stop shop for citizens looking to make sense of their country and community, one graph at a time.
