Show HN: I built an interactive map and search engine for US Census data

  • Great work.

    For some reason, when I gave it a very broad query I got the suggested result "[Table B18104?] Sex by Age by Cognitive Difficulty (Civilian noninstitutionalized population 5 years and over): Total".

    No idea why it picked that table. Instead of the more general "[Table B01003]: Total Population" or "[Table B01001] Sex by Age". In general I think a query's first result hit should be the least specific match.

    And the embeddings/full-text-search mishandle things that have no close match: the query "People who look like Kevin Bacon" returns "Number of People: Population by Ancestry: Basque (2022)"

  • The query engine doesn't understand the area of a state/county/zipcode(/census tract), unlke the official Census viewer https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/geo/demog...

    When I query for "population density" I only get tables of total population. Not "people/sq mile".

    Also, the default legend breaks are exponential (good) but not rounded to nearest n significant figures. And the color scheme is monochome green (hard to quickly read the map).