Re:Olympic Medal Count, Adjusted for Population and GDP
by whatusername on Monday August 25, 2008 @10:45PM
(#286702)
I thought I would be a smart-ass and re-create this data in Google Spreadsheet using GoogleLookup.. Should be great for this kind of thing.
2 minutes to get the medal tally, clean it up in excel and format out the country titles correct.
1 minute to Paste in Goog spreadsheet, setup GoogleLookup queries on each country for GDP / Pop.
2 minutes to fix up the 5 or so countries that it didn't recognise - Korea --> South Korea, Russian Federation --> Russia, Dominican Rep. --> Dominican Republic
And then I looked closely at the data Google pulled back...
USA:
* GDP: - "2006 estimate"
* Population - "31/km² (172nd)"
(A few other countries had similar results)
(Sure, it probably just means that wikipedia is formatted differently for some countries, but it ruined my efforts.. Even so - I still got 95% of the data within about 5 minutes, and links to wikipedia pages that probably contained the rest..)
--- And with a bit more digging it seems that Google is just getting the figures wrong from wikipedia.. Lots of the countries came from the CIA World fact book - that had the correct numbers in GSpreadsheet; but if it goes to Wikipedia it seems to grab the Pop. Density and not the Pop.
2 minutes to get the medal tally, clean it up in excel and format out the country titles correct.
1 minute to Paste in Goog spreadsheet, setup GoogleLookup queries on each country for GDP / Pop.
2 minutes to fix up the 5 or so countries that it didn't recognise - Korea --> South Korea, Russian Federation --> Russia, Dominican Rep. --> Dominican Republic
And then I looked closely at the data Google pulled back...
China: * GDP: - "$10 trillion (2006 est.) (purchasing power parity)", * Population: - "1,313,973,713 (July 2006 est.)"
USA: * GDP: - "2006 estimate" * Population - "31/km² (172nd)" (A few other countries had similar results)
(Sure, it probably just means that wikipedia is formatted differently for some countries, but it ruined my efforts.. Even so - I still got 95% of the data within about 5 minutes, and links to wikipedia pages that probably contained the rest..)
--- And with a bit more digging it seems that Google is just getting the figures wrong from wikipedia.. Lots of the countries came from the CIA World fact book - that had the correct numbers in GSpreadsheet; but if it goes to Wikipedia it seems to grab the Pop. Density and not the Pop.
Dear Google - please fix your scraper. :)