As I covered at Search Engine Land yesterday, Google launched a new one-box answer for queries related to [air quality] or [air pollution] – you can of course Google city variations, like [air quality beijing] or [air pollution delhi].
It works on desktop or mobile and is powered by a company named BreezoMeter, you can also click through to their web site to get more detailed information about the air quality in that location.
But over the past 20 hours or so since I published the story, the results have been weird. From Beijing’s air quality being horrible:
To it being super amazing:
I know the data is updated hourly or so, and I am no scientist but can air quality in Beijing go from an unhealthy score of 187 to a healthy score of 42 within 20 hours or so?
Many others are asking the same thing…
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: Here is a statement from Breezometer:
