BLS Data Finder
BLS Data Finder
Data Finder is a new search and navigation tool for BLS time series data available on the BLS website. Rather than searching individual data sets, Data Finder allows users to conveniently search multiple data sets all at once. Users can extract specific data by searching by keyword or by filtering through multiple topics, measures, and attributes. Feedback is greatly appreciated and will aid in further development of Data Finder.
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A good start, but could definitely use some work to make this user friendly. Here are just a few comments so far:
1. If you choose to “browse” by topic (on the left), that is pretty much useless because the headings are very non-specific and you really don’t know what you are getting. For example, if you click on “Commerce,” the first 3 choices listed are identical: “Employment: Total Nonfarm-Total Nonfarm. However, when you click on these, what you get is 1) Monthly total nonfarm employment; 2) Total nonfarm women employment; 3) Total nonfarm quarterly average employment. These should be reflected in the heading for each (so you know what you are getting before you click), otherwise browsing is rather pointless. Another example: If you choose to browse under employment, the very first page displays 15 choices, all “Employment: Total Private-Total Private. Again, you have no idea what you are actually going to get before you click on each of these. I understand that you can click on Catalog Data to the right to get more info, but I don’t think this is the best method of display.
2. Also, the data series returned is for one year. It would be useful to have the option to get more historical data right from here, and the option to get 12-month net or percent changes, for example.
3. For CES program data, the data finder displays the survey as “CE” (which I read as Consumer Expenditures), not the correct “CES.”
4. If you actually do know what you want (for example, Total nonfarm, women employment), the search tool works relatively well.
5. It is not clear if the choices in the lists on the left work as a filter function or not.
Hi, This tool looks great and I am hoping it can be of use to me. I am looking for data that allows me to compare wages and benefits by union-status across a few years, but when I place “union” in your search engine I am getting names of cities and not the “Union”/”nonunion” category. Have any recommendations?
The BLS beta website may want to look into presenting data in a two-column (date, data) format instead of the current multiple column format.
Users can already link to the data on the BLS website using Excel and other statistical programs, however, when the data is imported by linking to the website, Excel and most statistical programs are unable to graph and manipulate the data because it is formatted incorrectly.
By presenting data in a two column format users could easily link to the data on the BLS website, graph the data, update charts, update tables, etc. in a matter of moments in their own statistical programs or Excel. Dissemination of BLS information would become almost instantaneous and reduce the burden on all users.
With better dissemination of BLS products users would quickly have the data needed to make informed economic and business decisions.
Also, if BLS does indeed present data in a two-column format, then BLS would place itself in a perfect position to create an excel add-in that could rival that of the St. Louis Federal Reserve (FRED).
The St. Louis Federal Reserve (FRED) site is an outstanding site and BLS would be better off by using the site as an example. As others have commented, BLS seems to be implementing the FRED style and look. However, and most importantly, FRED data is presented in a two column (date, data) format.
I would welcome any opportunity to speak with the developers of the website to better explain my suggestions. I feel that making this slight change could revolutionize how BLS disseminates data to users while at the same time reducing the workload of the user.
Data from the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey have not yet been added to the new BLS Data Finder tool on Beta. We expect to add consumer expenditure data to the new tool later this year. Consumer expenditure data on mattresses are not available from the BLS website, but you can request such data by e-mailing
CEXInfo@bls.gov.searching for consumer spending estimates or history by category. specifically mattress. No results found in four attempts. submitted a request to be contacted.
Searching for “petro” recieved zero results, I had to type in petroleum fully. Please implement a capability to search incomplete terms, or, conversely, implement symbols to indicate further characters and have a tip pop up.
coool stuff
this is awesome
Looks like you’re going the way of FRED, which is kind of a pain to find the associated series connected to a statistical release, and one thing I know is a problem, if one knows the series ID but puts that up in FRED as a search, one won’t get that ID necessarily to pop up in the search results. I also suspect some of the meta tags aren’t correctly attached to the right series.
On the Beta…
Ok, I could pull up every series putting in “labor participation rate” and I could pull up a series by it’s ID, very fast.
But when I tried to do a secondary sub search, i.e. I had found “labor participation rate” and then wanted to do a subsearch on “ages 20-24″ nothing popped up, even when I put in 20, or age and I did x out the previous subsearch run that was displayed in the new tab.
So, it looks like you need the subsearches implemented and also need many more meta tags.
The few meta present, I could click on them and get that subgroup under “labor participation rate”, i.e. I clicked on “not seasonally adjusted’ and all the NSA labor participation rate did pop up, very fast.
ie. looking good as a work in processing and will be wunderbar to get rid of that JAVA!