I find it a decent barometer for how much a topic is being searched for. This is relevant to determining the popularity of a search term, which relates to the popularity of a topic.
Switzerland had a similar open source solution a few years ago. Unfortunately, the train operator forced it to shutdown as it was scraping the data from the timetables. Not sure how the new solution works but I hope it sticks around.
The situation with trains (and data) in Switzerland is complicated as each Kanton has it's own rail network. In 2016 the SBB _finally_ started making it's train timetable officially available (some info on that here - https://www.itmagazine.ch/artikel/64746/Open-Data-Plattform_... ) which is I believe what this map uses, after shutting down people scraping the data.
That said, what has always irked me is they gave the data to Google as far back as 2007, while refusing to make anything available for sites like local.ch and map.search.ch (who's map was partly basis for the original Google maps). Refusing may be a leading term but certainly there was no help given to local Swiss companies, while Google already had the train times in maps.
This doesn’t match my experience. Google requires feeds to be in a specific format [1] but the feed is push from the agency. When I was intimate with the details, agencies were strongly encouraged to publish these feeds at a public url. There were all kinds of things about the format itself that might not have worked for the good folks at local.ch but access to the data is not likely to have been a problem.
There’s gotta be a compelling government interest like health or safety, right? I don’t think “crypto is useless junk” will hold up to strict scrutiny.
