Google Dataset Search Engine

Introduction

Gathering and organizing as much information as possible, and easing the access for everybody around the world, has always been Google’s goal.

This goal’s first target was the commercial web, yet, the company has recently changed its usual target, and has shifted a bit towards the scientific community.

To better serve scientists and researchers, on September 5^th, 2018, Google has launched a service called Dataset Search, which is a search engine just for finding datasets on the internet. This search engine will act as an additional search tool for scientific communities, along with the company’s Google Scholar, which is the company’s most popular search engine for academic studies and reports.

Google Dataset Search Engine

Researchers have usually relied on sources like: the World Bank, NASA, ProPublica, IEA, IRENA or other search engines, but this new tool should make their work much easier, as it is dedicated to help journalists and researchers to easily reach the available public data.

Google Dataset Search will allow its users to search through enormous amount of datasets across tens of thousands of repositories on the web, whether they exist on a governmental database, public sources, publisher’s site, a digital library or an author’s personal web page. It applies the usual Google’s approach and design for search, but to datasets published across the web. For an example: the searcher can use a typical research words “Solar photovoltaics deployment statistics” to look for statistics and reports on the deployment situation.

The initial Dataset Search covers: environmental & social sciences, governmental data and datasets from news organizations, and is expected to expand to include more sources shortly.

The tool already supports multiple languages, and will be able to support more languages soon, and it is also expected to be used by scientists, journalists, data geeks, and basically anyone who is using data behind a specific topic.

Relevance for Renewable Energy Community

The importance of this tool for the energy community is clear:

• you can easily allocate all available public datasets
• you have easy access to as many possible datasets as possible
• you can see which format the respecitve dataset it (e.g. XLS)
• you can detect reliable information by identifying the publisher (e.g. the respective department of a Government)
• you can access the most recent dataset, as it always displays the last update (e.g. Sept, 27 2018).

It is expected that more datasets will be provided in the future.

Tip: you can also search only for data from one publisher. e.g. the World Bank by searching on their site only. site:worldbank.org energy

Commentary

Here are couple of comments from people either working on the project or working with it:

• “The aim is to unify the tens of thousands of different repositories for datasets online. We want to make the data discoverable, but keep it where it is.” Natasha Noy, a research scientist at Google AU who helped create Dataset Search.

• “This type of search has long been the dream for many researchers in the open data and science communities.” Ed Kearns, chief data office at NOAA.
  

Further Information

• https://toolbox.google.com/datasetsearch