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Google Public Data Explorer Makes Sea of Stats Easy to Understand

by Terrence O'Brien on March 9, 2010 at 06:30 AM

Google Public Data Explorer Makes Sea of Stats Easy to Understand

Google has been offering public data and statistics via search for some time now. In November, it added stores of information from the World Bank to its database. Now, the search giant has supplemented Google Labs with a new tool, the Public Data Explorer, which is designed to make that torrent of numbers a little easier to understand.

Data, anything from common last names to unemployment figures, can be combined and compared into line or bar graphs, as well as into animated maps and bubble charts. The animated bubble charts are particularly impressive. In the example below, you can watch the number of worldwide births drop as life expectancy increases. An extra layer of data is added by separating countries into color-coded bubbles. Representing various demographics, those bubbles grow and shrink in accordance with each group's size in relation to the overall population.

In addition to the World Bank, data can be culled from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, the California Department of Education, Eurostat, the U.S. Center for Disease Control, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (whew!) -- making it an invaluable tool for researchers, students, and anyone else who needs easy access to a bottomless store of statistics. [From: Official Google Blog]

Tags: data, google, googlelabs, PublicDataExplorer, statistics

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