Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Google’s search engine for datasets, the cunningly named Dataset Search, is now out of beta, with new tools to better filter searches and access to almost 25 million datasets.
Dataset Search launched in September 2018, with Google hoping to slowly unify the fragmented world of online, open-access data. Although many institutions like universities, governments, and labs publish data online, it’s often difficult to find using traditional search. But by adding open-source metadata tags to their webpages, these groups can have their data indexed by Dataset Search, which now covers a huge range of information — everything from skiing injuries to volcano eruptions to penguin populations.