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Google Now Offering Searchable World Bank Database

by Matthew Zuras on November 12, 2009 at 05:25 PM


Statistics nerds, rejoice! The World Bank, the institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital projects, released an application programming interface (API) for its wealth of statistics shortly after Google introduced searchable public data back in April. Now, the two have married their strengths and brought searchable World Bank data to Google.

Google Search now has access to 17 world development indicators, including life expectancy, military spending as percentage of GDP, and energy use per capita. (Follow the source link to find the complete list of available indicators.) We've already had some fun by checking out who in the world has a higher percentage of Internet use than the U.S. The fact that the always progressive Denmark, Switzerland, and Netherlands bested the America's 72-percent doesn't come as much of a surprise -- but the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda's 76-percent rate of use did throw us for a loop. Scroll over the country names in the chart above to see their individual statistics.

Unfortunately, there's currently no way to overlay different indicators' data points on the same chart (if you want to see fertility rates compared to CO2 emissions per capita, for example), but that can't be too far out. The ease of accessing and displaying this information really ratchets up the case for the Internet as a place of learning rather than polemical disinformation. As Google's blog notes, the purpose of incorporating the World Banks' data into searches is "to encourage debate based on fact rather than intuition." We can get behind that. [From: The Official Google Blog]

Tags: data, google, internet use, InternetUse, search, statistics, top, world bank, WorldBank

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