Yesterday, as everyone is reporting, Google launched what they call Google Dataset Search. A way to search datasets from environmental and social sciences, government, and ProPublica-style news organizations. The cool thing is this is all powered from the datasets schema that has been available for some time now.
Here is an example of what Google returns here:
Dare I say it? I was expecting more from Google with this, I do hope this is just the first step. Google did write "A search tool like this one is only as good as the metadata that data publishers are willing to provide. We hope to see many of you use the open standards to describe your data, enabling our users to find the data that they are looking for."
Google recently put something more consumer facing in the search results around datasets based on the datasets schema that was actually around since 2016 and now Google seems to be making a bigger push.
I'd love to see more answer based results here but for now, this is a very good start.
Here are some tweets about this:
I'm very excited to see the launch of Dataset Search, which can help researchers, scientists, and others around the world find open datasets!
— Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) September 6, 2018
To get a feel for it, try it with things like https://t.co/vrJDZxMVOw … orhttps://t.co/ilfbOyZ0S9 … orhttps://t.co/7JWCXGC0sg … https://t.co/4M57jf7tAv
Google's dataset search seems to be the most comprehensive tool of its type -- covers a variety of public and commercial domains, e.g. "police shootings" results include Kaggle, city portals, @datadotworld, and ICPSR: https://t.co/093OukOqq4 pic.twitter.com/EAKDdfuA3U
— Dan Nguyen (@dancow) September 5, 2018
I will caution, however, that the tool is clearly very early, and so while some of the results are spot-on, others are just … bizarre. pic.twitter.com/xSauaBg5DE
— Paul Kedrosky (@pkedrosky) September 5, 2018
To be fair, this does give people access to datasets they would not have known about prior - so an awesome first step.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
