Google has released a search option that can be used to look for datasets and to get access to the data quickly based on the search results.

The option is based on Dataset Search, a search engine that was designed specifically for dataset, and which has indexed 45 million datasets from 13,000 websites including government, scientific, and commercial datasets.

The new facility means you can click on any of the top three results of a search to go to the repository that hosts the dataset, or there's a More datasets option if you want to look further.

The new version of Dataset search has more features than were available in the beta version. You can now filter the results based on the types of dataset that you want (e.g., tables, images, text), or whether the dataset is available for free from the provider. If a dataset is about a geographic area, you can see the map.

Dataset Search shows users essential metadata about datasets and previews of the data where available. Dataset Search indexes dataset pages that contain schema.org structured data. The schema.org metadata allows Web page authors to describe the entities on the pages and their properties. For dataset pages, schema.org metadata describes key elements of the datasets, such as their description, license, temporal and spatial coverage, and available download formats. Dataset Search aggregates, normalizes and reconciles the metadata.

Google says that dataset authors and providers who want others to find their datasets in Search should make sure that the datasets are published in a way that makes it discoverable and specifies how others can reuse the data.  Google has advice for how to ensure datasets are correctly structured, including a Rich Results Test tool and a URL Inspection tool that tests how Google sees the page.

Dataset Search is available now.

More Information

Dataset Search

Google Structured Data Test Documentation

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