14 DAY TRIAL // Google just announced the addition of a wealth of new data coming straight from the World Bank. The data covers all sorts of statistics and numbers related to geopolitical information, things like Internet users in the US over time or GDP growth of almost any country in the world. The data is presented in new OneBox result which leads to a special page featuring a customizable chart.
“After some hard work and analysis, today we're happy to announce that 17 World Development Indicators are now conveniently available to you in Google search,” Chung Wu, software engineer at Google, wrote. “With today's update, you can quickly access more data with a broad range of queries. Search should be intuitive, so we've done the work to think through queries where public data will be most relevant to you.”
For example, when doing a search like “Internet usage in the US,” Google will now provide a small graph chart on top of the regular results showing the statistics over time and the latest numbers. Clicking on the result will take you to a dedicated page where you can see the data in more detail. You can also add more countries to compare the results and also get the numbers for previous years. The interesting thing is that the chart can be embedded into your blog or website as well, and you can choose to keep it static or update it when new data comes in.
Google pulls data on 17 different indicators using the World Bank API, which is free to use for any developer though Google most likely made some kind of a deal with the organization. The API provides over 114 indicators, but Google decided to focus on just the 17 for now. The announcement comes as Bing and Wolfram Alpha made a very similar one, in which Bing results for certain queries will be supplemented with data coming from the structured data search engine.