Google Public Data

Google Unveils New Tool To Dig for Public Data
Google launched a new search tool yesterday designed to help Web users find public data that is often buried in hard-to-navigate government Web sites.

The tool, called Google Public Data, is the latest in the company's efforts to make information from federal, state and local governments accessible to citizens. It's a goal that many Washington public interest groups and government watchdogs share with President Obama, whose technology advisers are pushing to open up federal data to the public.

Google Plumbs Government Files

Google has introduced a new search tool, Google Public Data, that allows users to plumb the depths of tough-to-navigate government sites like the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This will make it a lot easier for reporters to dig out useful public data and for anyone to settle arguments on a fact-based basis.


The new service also uses technology from Trendanalyzer, acquired in 2007, to provide more meaningful trends by providing visualization tools. According to the official Google blog:

The data we're including in this first launch represents just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers' salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on.



Search party: Public data from Google, public peek from WolframAlpha



Those cheeky Googlers. Tuesday was a big day for WolframAlpha, a soon-to-launch, sort-of search engine that in stealth mode was tabbed, quite against its will, as a would-be Google killer. Mathematician and entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram was at Harvard to give a webcast demo of his baby, one strength of which is its ability to present data visually and in context. And right in the middle of the presentation, Google quietly posted word of a new initiative in making public data easier to find, visualize and compare. Scamps.

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