World Bank public data, now in search


When we first launched public data on Google.com, we wanted to make statistics easier to find and to encourage debate based on facts rather than intuition. The day after we launched, a friend who worked at the World Bank called me, her voice filled with enthusiasm, "Did you know that the World Bank also just released an API for their data?" Excited, I checked it out, and found an amazing treasure trove of statistics for most economies in the world. After some hard work and analysis, today we're happy to announce that 17 World Development Indicators (list below*) are now conveniently available to you in Google search.

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]. For example, if you search for [internet users in the united states], you will see the following chart at the top of the results page:


Clicking on the result will bring you to an interactive chart where you can compare the United States with other regions around the world. We've also added a new feature to enable you to embed these charts in your own website or blog by clicking on the "Link" button in the upper right-hand corner of the chart page. You have the option to either embed the chart with static data, or you can also set the chart to update dynamically when new data becomes available. To give you a sense of what these charts look like, we've embedded the chart below comparing Internet users in the United States and South Korea: