Google Dataset Search: A new search service to find data from sciences, government, some news organizations

Google announced Wednesday a new specialty search feature named Dataset Search that is powered partially by the dataset schema we covered a few months ago.

Dataset Search allows searchers to find datasets on many topics across “environmental and social sciences, as well as data from other disciplines including government data and data provided by news organizations, such as ProPublica,” Google said. This search feature will be used by scientists, data journalists, data geeks and anyone who is curious about the data behind a specific topic find such data quickly.

Publishers and data providers can mark up their published data web pages so that Google can surface this data to searchers within this vertical search feature, as detailed in our previous report. Google is encouraging data providers to adopt this markup so that more people can locate their datasets within this search feature.

Google wrote, “As more data repositories use the schema.org standard to describe their datasets, the variety and coverage of datasets that users will find in Dataset Search, will continue to grow.”

Here is a screen shot showing how this feature returns data:

Here you will find data from NASA and NOAA, as well as from academic repositories such as Harvard’s Dataverse and Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).

Google has published its markup requirements for developers over here. You can access the Google Dataset Search feature at toolbox.google.com/datasetsearch.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.