

Google now searches public data - coglethorpe
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/adding-search-power-to-public-data.html

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mark_h
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.

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ggchappell
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.

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silentOpen
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!).

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ZeroGravitas
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.

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chacha102
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?

