Google is bringing its Dataset Search tool out of beta, opening it up to anyone interested in searching through the millions of datasets on public websites.
There are millions of datasets around the web just waiting for you to discover. If you ever wanted to find and explore any of them, you may have a hard time doing so. Not anymore, though. Google’s Dataset Search has indexed nearly 25 million datasets, letting users search through them and find links to where the data is.
The tool has been in beta for the last year, and after getting feedback from users Google has officially brought it out of beta.
The new version of Google’s Dataset Search has several new features. For example, you can now filter your results based on the types of datasets that you want – for example, tables, images, or text – or whether the dataset is available for free. Also, if a dataset is about a specific geographic area, you can see the map.
Furthermore, it’s now available on mobile and Google has improved the quality of dataset descriptions significantly.
One thing that hasn’t changed is how users who publish data can make their datasets discoverable in Dataset Search, using the open schema.org standard to describe the properties of their dataset on their site.
Whether you are an academic researcher, student, business analyst or data scientist, there are so many different types of data available, including information about “education,” “weather,” “cancer,” “crime,” “soccer,” and even… “dogs”.
Most governments around the globe publish their data and use schema.org to describe it, with the United States leading in the number of open government datasets available. The U.S. has published over 2 million datasets.
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