Google has recently been making an effort to “add search power to public data” so now you can google [unemployment rate] or [population] followed by a U.S. state or county and see a time line of changes over time. These data are from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division.

Along similar lines Google just announced a new tool, Google Squared that “automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet” (see full announcement) For example, “A search for “small dogs” pulls a list of small dogs organized by size, weight and breed” (read further).

These first examples are fairly uncontroversial, particularly because this is a neat new technology and not something people rely on .. yet. Just to illustrate the potential minefield that could await Google, why doesn’t the unemployment rate graph that Google provides let me break down the figure by race, for example? I’ve heard on the news that the rates are very different for African Americans and I want to look into that in my county. I know how to download data from the BLS, but most people don’t and certainly won’t. Race classification is a political issue in France, however: “Classifying people by their ethnicity is illegal in France – the nation of “liberty, equality, fraternity” considers all people should be equally French with no differentiation” (The Guardian). I hope this highlights the potential difficulties.

There are much more subtle issues that can have major consequences for how we understand information – see Tufte’s quite illuminating book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information for examples.