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Today on the Internet, there are thousands of databases. Many data sets published by local and national governments around the world. These databases grow with each passing day, and a person who needs to access them has it increasingly difficult. Unless you know how and where to look, diving into the immensity of existing information on the web to find, a piece of information is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Google wants to give solution.
Many researchers and journalists who could use them for different projects. But unfortunately there is no unified directory that allows you easy to access and query integrated data in any table or database.
As already did the Great G indexing and arranging the scientific articles, books and manuals in Google Scholar. The technological giant yesterday presented a new search engine focused on the data sets. His name is Dataset Search and, of course, it is free.
Luckily Google has just launched a new search engine called Dataset Search. Which as Google indicates in the ad, will help “scientists, data journalists, data geeks or anyone else to find the data required for their work and their stories , or simply to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. ”
Dataset Search is able to locate data sets no matter where they are hosted. As explained by a publication on the official Google blog. Through the tool you can consult information coming from any address, be it public addresses, digital libraries or personal webs of an author.
This new data set search engine works in a similar way to Google Scholar, with Dataset Search they will be able to find the data sets in any place where they are housed, both in the website of those who publish them, a digital library, as well as in the personal site of the author.
Google developed a set of guidelines for data set providers to describe the same. So that Google and other search engines can better understand the content of their pages. If the data set is structured using the markup of schema.org or similar, described by ‘World Wide Web’ Consortium (W3C), then Google can find it. Anyone who publishes data can describe and label them using this form to make their search somewhat easier.
Providers must include information such as who created the data set, when it was published, how they obtained the data, the terms for the use of the data and other information. Once the above is done, Google obtains this information, analyzes if there are different versions of the same data set and searches for publications that describe or discuss it.
Searches must be clear and carried out in a ways that allow Google to understand the content of the pages. It is recommended to use a ‘sitemap’ or URL list of the site that the user wants to index. So that the search engine can find the corresponding address.
Anyone can enter right now and search by data sets. The design is similar to the original Google search engine and offers almost the same features. The results of a search show them in a column to the left and to the right of that column; it includes the information of each of the results each time one of them is selected.
Image Credit: Google Data Search
Dataset Search is available in several languages and has information from a variety of sources, including the US, although it is still in beta. Google intends to bring the tool to new languages soon. This initiative is part of the company’s efforts to make the data collected in documents or databases on the Internet more accessible. You can use it to find the latest unemployment data in USA sorted by municipalities (just look for “unemployment USA”) or a record of weather in the United States (looking for “Daily Weather Records”).
