LifeHacker gives a nice rundown of the new Google Search Options:
Google’s honchos unveiled the new “Search Options” at a Searchology event, one that coincides with the two year anniversary of the Universal Search unveiling that put b…

As some researchers might suggest, publicly available data can be tedious to extract….

google has two possibilities.

a, trying to index as many datasets as possible. Difficult, as they do not have a unified metadata architecture, unlike, say, books, scientific papers or blog posts (where google books, scholar and blogsearch really shine). But not impossible as data gets published in an increasingly formal way.
The advantage is that this will help people answer questions about data.

b, index a few datasets that they like for some arbitrary reason, but with nice feature like dynamic charts or maps.
advantage: people will talk about it. but it won’t be useful to anyone.

I’m sorry to see that google pursues option b. Hope someone really tries to solve the data search problem one day.

Google has the potential to really open up and make use of public data. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wasted time digging around government sites for simple data sets.

I wonder how this will affect libraries?

I wonder how this will affect people like the Sunlight Foundation, whose main charge has been to make government data that’s publicly available easier to access through sites like http://opencongress.org ? Will this help or hurt them?

In times ahead, we will certainly see more and more applications that understand the structure of data available on the Web.

At Cazoodle, we are using such technology to build structured vertical search engines. Our first product Apartment Search allows renters to search for apartments and houses from everywhere on the Web, in a precise way.

http://www.cazoodle.com