Google publishes search engines that search for datasets

Google's goal is to help organize, encrypt and organize the world's information with its first goal being commercial websites. Now, the company wants to do the same for the scientific community with a new search engine for the data set.

This service, called Dataset Search , is launching today and is a companion to Google Scholar , another popular search engine for research and study reports. Organizations, such as universities and governments, will need to include a metadata tag in the web section describing their data, including the creator of the data, when it is published. This information will then be indexed by Dataset Search and combined with input from Google's Knowledge Graph.

Speaking to The Verge, Natasha Noy, a research scientist at Google AI, who helped create Dataset Search, said the goal of the development team was to confuse tens of thousands of different databases for datasets. online.

At present, various scientific fields have their own favorite archives, as well as governments and local governments always have certain constraints on the source of data. This makes the process of searching scientific data extremely difficult and time consuming.

Noy gives an example of a climate scientist she recently talked about, who told her that finding a specific ocean temperature data set for an upcoming study is nearly impossible. It is possible because it can not be found anywhere. Later on, she was fortunate to find it thanks to the guidance of a colleague. In other words, the information we need is always present but extremely difficult to reach and search.

The first release of Dataset Search will include areas of environmental and social science, government data, and data sets from news organizations like ProPublica. However, if this service becomes more popular, the amount of data that it indexes will rapidly surge as scientists begin to pay attention to making their scientific work more accessible.

It's Google's involvement that will help make this project a success, says Jeni Tennison, CEO of Open Data Institute (ODI). "Seeking data sets is always a difficult thing, and I hope Google will join and make it easier," she said.

In fact, Tennison says, ideally Google will launch its own dataset on how Dataset Search is used. Although the company's metadata tag used to display the search dataset is quite effective, the search engine is the fastest to gain when a large number of users use it.