14 DAY TRIAL // Google sure likes data and numbers and, to share the love with everyone, it launched a brand-new tool in Labs, Google Public Data Explorer, which provides a way of visualizing the various data sets the search engine has been incorporating. The tool adds even more data sources to the ones Google had already been using, like the World Bank.
"[T]oday we're also releasing the Google Public Data Explorer in Labs, a new experimental product designed to help people comprehend data and statistics through rich visualizations. With the Data Explorer, you can mash up data using line graphs, bar graphs, maps and bubble charts. The visualizations are dynamic, so you can watch them move over time, change topics, highlight different entries and change the scale. Once you have a chart ready, you can easily share it with friends or even embed it on your own website or blog," Jürgen Schwärzler, statistician from the Google Public Data team, explains.
Last year, Google launched a public data search feature, which enabled users to find various statistics and data sets from the ones available to the search engine. Recently, it expanded the tool with a lot of new data from the World Bank. For related searches, the data is displayed in the search results page in a dedicated OneBox. The data is also available in a dedicated page where you can select any indicator that interests you and have it displayed in an embeddable chart.
With the Public Data Explorer tool, Google takes it one step further by providing animated charts, which are much better at showing the variation of the statistical information over time. As before, the charts can be embedded on sites or blogs. The timeline can be manually adjusted or the graph can be 'played back' by clicking the play button.
The tool isn't exactly mainstream, but there are quite a lot of people that might find some of the data very useful. And, as Google has found, people actually search for a lot of statistical information even without realizing it. In order to know which data sets to include first, Google made an ample analysis of people's searches to find which statistical data was the most sought after, with the top 10 results below:
1. School comparisons 2. Unemployment 3. Population 4. Sales tax 5. Salaries 6. Exchange rates 7. Crime statistics 8. Health statistics (health conditions) 9. Disaster statistics 10. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)