Search Me Out

So apparently Google released a new search tool yesterday, which helps search for difficult to find government public data. As someone who has to search for public data on a somewhat regular basis, I applaud their effort, but find their initial release puzzling. Currently you can only search for unemployment rates and populations for a particular state or county, according to the Google blog. I find this odd, because it's actually quite easy to get this data immediately from the Census Bureau website, as this is like the only public data that is easy to find. I may be a bit biased, as I do use the CB data quite a bit, and even get to play with the private data from time to time as part of my job, but I still think someone could find it quite easily. It will be interesting to see what they add to it next, as it has a lot of promise.