On Wednesday, Google announced the beta release of a new search engine called Dataset Search. Aimed at scientists and journalists looking for precise datasets, this search engine lets them find what they need no matter where they’re hosted.
You can think of Dataset Search as Google Scholar, the popular search engine for research papers and reports. With the new tool, the company aims to unify thousands of data sources and act as a primary gateway.
Let's say you want to learn about car accidents and related datasets. All you have to do is type in the query and Google will list all the sources as shown below. Simply click on any source on the left and see more details:
To ensure that datasets are accessible through Google’s tool, the company recommends that institutions adopt the open-source Schema markup standard. It allows publishers to include machine-readable data, such as publication date, how the data was collected, terms of use, and more.
The Dataset Search engine already works with multiple languages, and the company plans to expand support for more languages in the future.
Datasets from organizations such as NOAA, NASA, Harvard Dataverser, ProPublica, etc., are already accessible through the tools, and more data providers are expected to be added soon.
