Egads Google does everything

Well, in addition to providing:

• the best search algorithm on the Internet for content, hands down, in text, pictures and video
  
• free email
• context-driven advertising
• aggregated news from over a thousand news outlets
  
• interactive mapping technology
• word processing and number crunching
• cloud computing
• personal syndication of any content you want
• photo-sharing communities
• API's to let developers harness Google's technology for their own uses
  
• and most of the above offered on mobile platforms in addition to desktop platforms
• not to mention free hosting of this very blog and thousands of others;

Google is introducing yet another interesting and free product: visualization of public data, vis a vis interactive graphs of unemployment statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census. So Google's taking publicly available data and visualizing it using technology from Trendalyzer, a firm it acquired two years ago.

To see one of the new graphs, and there's one for each county and many cities in the nation I'm pretty sure, just type "unemployment rate" and a city or county and state into Google's search box. The graph appears at the top of the search results. Pretty cool.

In its blog entry announcing the new feature, Google says: "We also hope that this will pave the way for public data to take a more central role in informed public conversations."

Sounds like Google is taking a cue straight from the mission statements of newspapers. Of course, this is something newspapers and their Web sites don't readily do. So it's only fitting Google is going to eat our lunch.