Google has just announced that it will be adding public data graphs to search results in order to give users the ability to visualize things like unemployment data. This is a big leap forward for allowing public data to be more accessible to users.
The public data is accessible by searching for a US city, and a term such as ‘unemployment rate’. Instead of having to navigate badly designed government websites, you will be given a chart at the top of the search results with the current unemployment rate of the specified city. You can click through to compare it to other cities, the US as a whole, or other reigons.
As Google adds more products to their main search engine, it steps forward in making it easier to find all types of data. Instead of just links to external websites, Google offers links to user profiles, news, stocks, trends, and other data from its various products.
In response to this release, Wolfram, the search engine that is promising to given users answers to semantic questions, has released screenshots of their interface. You can find them here.
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