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Looking to find the unemployment rate of Cecil County, Maryland, for 2008? What if you want to compare that to the unemployment rate of the entire country for that year? Google’s new Public Data search function makes finding this information much easier, and it’s been made available as of yesterday in a format that’s as easy to navigate as Google’s homepage itself.

Unemployment Rates Made Easier

So far Google’s only rolled out that particular feature, but they’ve got big plans for the future. Check out what Google Product Manager Ola Rosling has to say on the company’s blog:

The data we’re including in this first launch represents just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on. Reliable information about these kinds of things exists thanks to the hard work of data collectors gathering countless survey forms, and of careful statisticians estimating meaningful indicators that make hidden patterns of the world visible to the eye. All the data we’ve used in this first launch are produced and published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division. They did the hard work! We just made the data a bit easier to find and use.

Believe it or not, Google is not the first company to try to make such information available on the Internet. According to the Washington Post, Wikipedia and Amazon have been hard at work to provide similar services, with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wale going so far as pushing outside agencies to write their own wikis to open up this public data.

Kudos to Google for getting there first, but it does raise the question as to why such a development took so long to bring to fruition. According to the Post, the E-Government Act of 2002 “required government agencies to make information more accessible electronically,” but that didn’t quite go according to plan. Most government-affiliated agencies grew quite adept at sneakily hiding that information somewhere within their site. Others would allegedly embed codes in their sites to make searching for certain pages all but impossible.

Well all tricks and trades are moot now, concealers. The secret’s out, and we demand to know how much our butcher makes!