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Here’s a new search….well, a form of new search. Search king Google has launched the Dataset Search, to help scientists, data journalists, data geeks, “or anyone else can find the data required for their work & their stories, or simply to satisfy their intellectual curiosity.”
Announcing this on its official blog post, Google said the new search, similar to how Google Scholar works, will allow users to find datasets wherever they’re hosted, whether it’s a publisher’s Site, a digital library, or an author’s personal Web page.
To create Dataset search, we developed guidelines for dataset providers to describe their data in a way that Google (& other search engines) can better understand the Content of their pages. These guidelines include salient information about datasets: who created the dataset, when it was published, how the data was collected, what the terms are for using the data, etc. We then collect & link this information, analyze where different versions of the same dataset might be, & find publications that may be describing or discussing the dataset.
Google’s approach is based on an open standard for describing this information (schema.org) & anyone who publishes data can describe their dataset this way. Dataset Search works in multiple languages with support for additional languages coming soon.
How To Use Google Dataset Search
Simply enter what you are looking for & this Dataset Search engine will take you to the published dataset on the repository provider’s Site. For example, a search for daily weather reports will take you to data provided by NASA & NOAA, to name a few.
Google said the new dataset search launch was 1 of a series of initiatives to bring datasets more prominently into its products. Recently, Google made it easier to discover tabular data in Search, which uses this same metadata along with the linked tabular data to provide answers to queries directly in search results.
While those initiatives focused more on news organizations & data journalists, Dataset search can be useful to a much broader audience, whether you’re looking for scientific data, government data, or data provided by news organizations, claimed Google.
