Google It

Nov 12th, 2009 4:49 PM UTC
By Chris Scott

This week brings an exciting new development for Google enthusiasts and all those interested in fact-based debate and data. According to the Official Google Blog, World Bank public data will now be more readily available and easy to find through the search engine.

Google explains it like this:

With today’s update, you can quickly access more data with a broad range of queries. Search should be intuitive, so we’ve done the work to think through queries where public data will be most relevant to you. To see the new data, try queries like [gdp of indonesia], [life expectancy brazil], [rwanda's population growth], [energy use of iceland], [co2 emissions of iceland] and [gdp growth rate argentina].

So click on “rwanda’s population growth” which I’ve hyperlinked above, and you’ll find an image that brings you here. Here you can cross-check Rwanda’s population growth with, say, Angola’s or Iceland’s. And that’s just a sample of the wealth of information Google has made available through the World Bank. The hope is that this new embedding feature “will help facilitate quick and easy access to public statistics.”

Check it out, and let us know what you think.

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