
Atlas – a platform for charts and data - uptown
https://www.theatlas.com/
======
dschnurr
Our team at Graphiq has been working on a similar tool for publishers and
consumers to quickly find visualizations. One differentiator from Atlas is
that many of our charts are dynamically generated on the fly based on the
search query–for example, "usa vs india gdp", "population of the country with
the tallest building", "obama vs clinton approval rating". You can try it out
here: [https://www.graphiq.com/search](https://www.graphiq.com/search)

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an4rchy
Graphiq has a much better search algorithm, or at least you've covered the
primary use cases well.

Although, I'm curious, what is Graphiq's business model?

~~~
dschnurr
We provide visualizations to journalists and publishers for free and then
monetize readers on our site through display advertising. Additionally, we
have offerings for developers and companies who want to utilize our knowledge
graph in different ways.

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delgaudm
What an odd front page. "Type to search", with no indication of what to search
_for_. I typed in 4 searches, got "No results found" for all of them. Strange.

~~~
lobo_tuerto
I typed "Mexico" and got a series of charts back.

Seems like it's more like tag search.

~~~
a3n
I typed "search".

[https://www.theatlas.com/search/search](https://www.theatlas.com/search/search)

~~~
komali2
I typed "Virtual Reality" and got back "Media depictions of Latinos don't
match reality"
[https://www.theatlas.com/charts/V1RJtzYA](https://www.theatlas.com/charts/V1RJtzYA)

Can anybody ELI5 what this site's supposed to be doing?

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a3n
Maybe it's searching in a very small search space.

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rfjedwards
This is not a thing like Wolfram Alpha. It appears to be a searchable index of
charts/data from Quartz (QZ.com) and partners (like sponsor GE). Note that T&C
in registration goes to QZ.com ([http://qz.com/about/terms-
conditions/](http://qz.com/about/terms-conditions/)) .

~~~
bloaf
Thanks for that, Wolfram Alpha was the first comparison I thought of.
Gapminder was the second.

[http://www.gapminder.org/world](http://www.gapminder.org/world)

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d--b
Can someone who upvoted comment on what this is supposed to do? I searched
`car sales in Europe` and the first chart I got is `new startups valued at 1bn
or more`

~~~
cpsempek
I searched "tsla" and "tsla price" (and again "aapl" and "aapl price"). The
first gave me more or less what I was after, the second returned results about
cocaine and mdma prices per gram. As others have mentioned, absolutely
miserable search, truly a groping about in the dark.

They might as well have clickable paths for you to follow based on categories
and such. I would have had a lot more fun exploring their content in this way.
Instead I'll probably never use this again.

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Flenser
Other things called Atlas:

HashiCorp's Enterprise Suite -
[https://www.hashicorp.com/#products](https://www.hashicorp.com/#products)

Stripe's startup tools - [https://stripe.com/atlas](https://stripe.com/atlas)

Netflix's Telemetry Platform -
[http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/12/introducing-atlas-
netfli...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/12/introducing-atlas-netflixs-
primary.html)

O’Reilly's learning environment -
[http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/](http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/)

Boston Dynamics's Robot -
[http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_Atlas.html](http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_Atlas.html)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY)

Did I miss any?

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d--b
A very large person, long ago, tasked to carry the world or something

~~~
shriphani
Tasked to carry the sky actually.

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lucideer
The design is nice enough, but the UX is awful, and pretty much for only one
reason: search.

It seems to be a site listing charts, stats, data. Scrolling down or using the
"Explore" nav item top-left works fine for browsing.

Search seems to be a secondary feature that is a simple keyword search on site
content (the kind of site search that's usually subtle and off to one side),
as opposed to a deliberately designed and targeted search on specific content
facets. For some odd reason some designer has thought this should be front and
centre despite being not a very good way to find anything specific. Adding the
following CSS rule would massively improve the site:

    
    
      .hero .search-container { display: none; }
    

Otherwise, it seems nicely put together

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devin
Forgive me, but why has this story received so many upvotes? As others have
mentioned, the front page provides no example of what to search for, and once
I finally got a few results, they were less than interesting. Maybe I'm just
not the target audience? Is there actually a need for this?

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anamoulous
Fantastic, a searchable collection of graphs that take specialists from the
media can misinterpret.

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CameronBanga
What are the terms on these? Is the idea that someone could use these as
citation in a presentation or paper?

And not sure given the page what I should be searching for? I only guessed
businesses, because Quartz, but the search for Apple offered odd results.

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hauget
No tutorial for first time visitors is kind of a fail. When a search fails,
there should be a message stating something like "why don't you try searching
for X".

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m52go
I wonder how lucrative the partnership with GE is / will be.

As a user interested in the future of digital economic models, I would love it
if this sort arrangement makes the service viable...

The sponsorships is cleanly integrated and both entities' purposes seem to
overlap (i.e., the ads are native...i.e., GE is showing charts like the rest
of the site, not banner ads).

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joezydeco
I took this whole thing as a glorified GE analytics ad.

~~~
devonkim
Probably related somewhat to the lukewarm general tech industry reception to
Predix.

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liquidise
While this is nifty idea, the execution is a bit off. More troubling is the
shocking misrepresentation of much of the data.

Take the Diamond Cutters graph [1] where the Y-axis includes US, Namibia and
"East Asia". Did "diamond cutters per capita per country" not show the the
intended conclusion? This trend persists through many of the graphs i've
clicked on.

1\.
[https://www.theatlas.com/charts/EJJSh2f6e](https://www.theatlas.com/charts/EJJSh2f6e)

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jbob2000
Is this a library? Or some kind of data service? How does this compare to
[http://www.highcharts.com/](http://www.highcharts.com/) ?

~~~
pcurve
It's a collection of statistics represented in chart format. It's not
javascript charting framework like highcharts or d3. It's more about browsing
and sharing statistics.

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fareesh
Tried to register but got a cryptic "Unable to register using that email
address and username". Tried several combinations with no luck. I think it is
in some sort of closed beta.

Being able to quickly generate a good looking chart that intelligently picks
ranges, min, max, etc. and share it with a public URL seems nifty. Are there
other similar services that have a pain-free way of doing this sans google
sheets?

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ThatMightBePaul
Why is this interesting, when the charts all lack clear data sources?

Numbers without context are meaningless.

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placeybordeaux
US birth rate gives about 10 completely unrelated charts.

[https://www.theatlas.com/search/us%20birth%20rate](https://www.theatlas.com/search/us%20birth%20rate)

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duck
This isn't new either, was shared a year ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9763980](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9763980)

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SingAlong
If you try to register and get this error about invalid username and password,
then try disabling your ad blocker (it worked for me that way).

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aristus
I searched for [oranges] and got a mix of fruit juice and prison inmate
statistics. What kind of fuzzy matching is going on here?

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iampuero
My bet is that it matched the show "Orange is the new Black", seems just like
its searching by tags.

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tomelders
I'm heartened to see a distinct lack of 'donut' charts, the scourge of the
infographic world.

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m104
Do you have support for logarithmic charts?

Some of those top examples would benefit greatly from a logarithmic Y-axis.

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galistoca
Not really a "platform". It's just charts and graphs from QZ.

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abcampbell
Good idea, but search isn't great

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misiti3780
sorry if i dont understand here but is this basically gist for charts ?

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findjashua
searching for `usa gdp` showed charts for everything other than usa gdp

