Google Improves Its Dataset Search Engine
Google's Dataset Search is officially out of beta, offering you access to almost 25 million of datasets and links to where the data is.
Google has added new features to the Dataset Search. You can now filter the results based on the types of dataset that you want (e.g., tables, images, text), or whether the dataset is available for free from the provider. If a dataset is about a geographic area, you can see the map. Plus, the product is now available on mobile and Google has improved the quality of dataset descriptions. One thing hasn't changed however: anybody who publishes data can make their datasets discoverable in Dataset Search by using an open standard (schema.org) to describe the properties of their dataset on their own web page.
Google has also added many different types of data based on waht the of people look for. "There are academic researchers, finding data to develop their hypotheses (e.g., try oxytocin), students looking for free data in a tabular format, covering the topic of their senior thesis (e.g., try incarceration rates with the corresponding filters), business analysts and data scientists looking for information on mobile apps or fast food establishments, and so on. There is data on all of that," Google says.
Dataset Search also gives Google a snapshot of the data out there on the Web. Here are a few highlights. The largest topics that the datasets cover are geosciences, biology, and agriculture. The majority of governments in the world publish their data and describe it with schema.org. The United States leads in the number of open government datasets available, with more than 2 million. And the most popular data format is Tables–you can find more than 6 million of them on Dataset Search.
If you have a dataset on your site and you describe it using schema.org, an open standard, others can find it in Dataset Search. If you know that a dataset exists, but you can't find it in Dataset Search, ask the provider to add the schema.org descriptions and others will be able to learn about their dataset as well.
Dataset Search is out of beta, but Google promises to continue to improve the product, whether or not it has the "beta" next to it.