Google Public Data

Last week, Google unveiled their new Public Data Explorer. If you’ve ever seen Gapminder, this is very similar.

In fact, Google bought the Trendalyzer software from Gapminder and applied it to data from Eurostat, the US Census Bureau and many other sources: Datasets

For me, the main question with Google is where they’ll next head in their persistent quest for market share and eventually world domination. Chrome, Android, Google Maps, YouTube, all added to their repertoire and threatened the competitors in those fields. When was the last time you used Mapquest?

With Public Data, the main target seems to be Wolfram Alpha with its database of everything from the lethal dosage of caffeine to algorithms for solving differential equations. Granted, Google is mostly sticking to Gapminder’s domain: global population statistics. But with their tendency to obsessively add new functionality (also last week: bike routes on Google Maps!), it’s only a matter of time.

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