November 11, 2009
Public Data at Search Engines
Google Makes World Bank Data More Discoverable: Takes a Swipe at Wolfram Alpha by Frederic Lardinois, Read Write Web (Nov 11)
Google will get data from the World Bank on queries like children per woman in brazil or gdp of india. Data is presented in an interactive graph, making it easier to select a period and to compare to other countries. There are several energy questions Google and the World Bank can answer - Electricity consumption per capita - where Canada exceeds the US and the UK.
Wolfram Alpha handles similar queries also using "curated data sets" like the World Bank.
Bing is not idle. Microsoft has some arrangements (not completely clear) to use Wolfram Alpha for data queries -- Bing Teams Up With Wolfram Alpha
"A query for "french fries" will still result in the standard search results page with a list of links, but a new compute tab in the left sidebar will open up results from Wolfram Alpha."
For now, it is nutrition and math.
Posted by Gwen at November 11, 2009 05:38 PM