Google has launched a certain dataset search website to help journalists and researchers unearth publicly available data that can aid in their projects. Traditionally, researchers have built on sources like the World Bank, NASA, and ProPublica or search engines like Kaggle. This special tool will make their work much easier.
The website takes Google’s familiar strategy and designed for research and applies it to datasets published across the web.
So if you need to look at historical weather trends, you can make of simple query like “daily weather” to start your research. In addition to, the engine supports shortcuts that work on Google’s regular search tool, like ‘weather site:noaa.gov’ to retrieve results only from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agency in the US.
The company described that the new tool scrapes government databases, public sources, digital libraries, and personal websites to track down the datasets you’re looking for.
If they’re structured using schema.org’s markup or same equivalents described by the W3C, Google can find it. It already supports multiple languages.
This year, Google has targeted a lot of initiatives directed towards journalists. In July, it had rolled out enhanced representation of tabular data in search results.
In India, it has launched a program to train journalists to find misinformation. And at its developer conference before this year, it rolled out a revamped Google News with improved personalization and discovery features.