You probably rely on Google to search the Web, but in late April it announced a new project to find and compare public data. I waited awhile to see if any more data
sets, but there aren't any yet, so let's look at the public data for which you can currently search.

Google currently lets you search for population or unemployment rate information for any state or county in the US. Just go to Google.com and enter the word population or unemployment rate followed by the name of a US county or state. Google will provide a chart, like the one in the screen shots that go with this blog entry.

In the example, I typed unemployment rate wake county. Google gave me a thumbnail chart as part of the regular search results, but when I clicked on that I got a larger chart. (See the screen shot.) With the larger chart came a navigation on the left part of the screen that allowed me to choose other states and counties.

So I chose Cumberland County, NC, to get a chart that compared the two locations' unemployment rate. (See the screen shot.) But you can also compare states to counties, so the last chart I did compared North Carolina's general unemployment rate to the rates of the two counties. (Screen shot again.)

For the last month or so the only data sets you've been able to search have been population and unemployment, but Google is both anticipating more sets available in the future and expects that these sets will be used to fuel discussions from the classroom to the boardroom, as they put it. Between this and the new openness of Data.gov, there should be a lot of chart-making going on in time for the 2010 elections...