American FactFinder

» see factfinder.census.gov as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

I have never needed a number out of the United States census. What I have done, more than once, is click a footnote in a paper or a Wikipedia citation and land on a census URL that goes nowhere. That is how American FactFinder reaches anyone outside America now: as a link that used to work and does not.

It went up in 1999 and for the next two decades it was the front door to the largest public statistics operation in the world. You picked a geography, picked a table, and it handed you the numbers. Behind the form sat the decennial census and the American Community Survey, the same data a demographer would query through other means, made reachable by a person who had none of that training and half an hour to spare. Journalists used it on deadline. Local governments used it to write grant applications. It was slow and it looked its age, and it worked.

The Census Bureau announced the transition in September 2019, stopped publishing new releases into it in mid-2019, and left it up as a read-only archive through the winter. On 31 March 2020 it was switched off. The successor, data.census.gov, had been live alongside it since 2019.

~ the case file ~

~ what a front door is worth ~

The interesting thing about FactFinder is not the software. It is that a statistical agency decided, in 1999, that the general public should be able to reach its numbers without an intermediary. That was not obvious at the time and in most countries it still is not. Plenty of national statistics offices published tables in the same period and made you download a spreadsheet with column headers only an insider could read.

What FactFinder built instead was a query interface aimed at somebody who did not know the vocabulary. You could get to a table for your own town without knowing that the thing you wanted was called a summary file.

~ the timing ~

It was retired on 31 March 2020, which is a date with two other things attached to it. The 2020 census had opened for self-response nineteen days earlier, and the United States had just gone into the first weeks of the pandemic. So the bureau turned off its best-known public tool in the exact month it most needed the public to trust it, and in the month everyone with a laptop suddenly started looking up population and health statistics for their own county.

The replacement handled it. But there is a specific kind of user who only shows up once every ten years, learns the tool during the census, and does not come back until the next one. That user arrived in 2020 to find the tool gone.

~ the dead links ~

The real inheritance is broken citations. Twenty years of academic papers, planning documents and news stories cited factfinder.census.gov URLs, because that was the correct thing to cite. Those URLs carried the table and the geography and the year encoded in them, and none of them map onto the new system. The numbers are all still published. The addresses are not, and a citation is an address.

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