Future:Media:Change

blogging the intersection of media, technology and the global good

Google creates new data visualization with World Bank stats, but I still can’t figure out maternal mortality rate of Sierra Leone

13 November 2009 View Comments

I created the chart above using Google’s new integration of World Bank statistics in search results. The chart shows internet users per 100 people in countries from various regions.

Chris Scott talks about why the inclusion of World Bank stats is important on ONE’s blog.

So click on “rwanda’s population growth” which I’ve hyperlinked, and you’ll find an image that brings you here. Here you can cross-check Rwanda’s population growth with, say, Angola’s or Iceland’s. And that’s just a sample of the wealth of information Google has made available through the World Bank. The hope is that this new embedding feature “will help facilitate quick and easy access to public statistics.”

Google launched its public data feature back in April, right in time to upstage search engine upstart, Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha attempts to provide the actual answers to search queries rather than pointing users to sites that may have the answer. It uses a combination of public data and internal computations to give the users concrete results. Microsoft recently integrated Wolfram Alpha into its new Bing search engine.

Google’s choice to feature “internet users in the United States” in the blog post showcasing the World Bank integration is fascinating for those of us who remember the screenshot Wolfram Alpha used in publicity showing internet users in Europe. My first exposure to Alpha was in several blog posts using this photo to illustrate how the search engine provides new results compared to the old model.

The search results on Wolfram Alpha of 'internet users in Europe'

Clearly, the search wars are good for all of us end users. Google has benefited from the push from Wolfram Alpha and the new threat of BingBing. The promise of one search engine that queries thousands of data sets to give hard answers is exciting. However, none of the tools are quite there.

The low number of internet users in Africa on the Google chart had me wondering how many mobile users there are on the continent. Google didn’t have data visualizations for this and returned a standard list of links. So I headed over to Wolfram Alpha where they gave me a nice chart and stats by region and country showing 272m users with the most, 42.3m in S. Africa.

A map of mobile users in Africa returned by Wolfram Alpha

I wonder how many of these mobile subscribers use Twitter in Africa. No dice. Wolfram gives me a link to “Twitter users,” which uses Compete.com data from February to say there are 6 million total users on Twitter. Not what I was looking for and definitely not current.

Of course, a geographic breakdown of Twitter users isn’t available in any public data sets or api. Let’s try something more useful like the maternal mortality rate in Sierra Leone. Google gives me a list of links, some more useful than others, but the answer certainly does not pop to the top. I try Wolfram Alpha and get a result that cannot be right: “483 deaths per year.”

Search result for 'Maternal Mortality in Sierra Leone'

Okay, maybe I’m an idiot. How about “Maternal Mortality rate in Sierra Leone“? We are getting closer: “0.17 deaths per 100,000 persons per year” according to 2002 statistics says Alpha. Finally I head back to Google and search, “maternal mortality rates by country,” which leads me to maternal mortality country data on ChildInfo.org. 2,100 deaths per 100,000 live births and 5,400 total, giving a woman in Sierra Leone a 1 in 8 chance of dying in child birth. Hey, Google and Wolfram Alpha, that data would be useful in a nice clean chart. Hey, world, those stats SUCK! Let’s do something about it.

* Complete list of World Bank indicators currently available on Google: