Google Dataset Search: A New Search Engine For Scientific Community

Google has always been on frontlines when it comes to organizing the world’s information, they did it with the commercial web. Now, it wants to do the same with the scientific community with Dataset Search.

Dataset Search specializes in datasets that are useful to scientists, students, or anyone else. In today’s world data is everything and scientists/ students in many disciplines live and breathe data.Dataset Search indexes the metadata tags that describe the data, creator of data, published date, and others. These metadata needs to be provided by institutions that upload these kind of datasets. Google states that their approach is based on an open standard found at schema.org and encourages dataset providers to follow the standard.

The Dataset Search is still in beta and Google has made available references to most datasets in environmental and social sciences as well as data from other disciplines. It also contains datasets published by government and news organizations.

Searching for the dataset is very easy. You just enter what you are looking for and Google will guide you to the published dataset.

Take a look at following example for reference:

Googles Dataset search is inexplicably dependent upon the schema markup for dataset providers. Google states that this search tool is only as good as the metadata that data publishers are willing to provide.