Google launches new Search engine for scientific community

Google on Thursday launched Dataset Search, a new search engine designed to help scientists, researchers, data journalists and other users discover datasets available across the internet.

The new service aims to make it easier for people to find and understand millions of datasets hosted on different websites, digital libraries, publishers' platforms and even personal web pages. Google said the tool could be useful not only for professional research but also for anyone looking to explore data out of intellectual curiosity.

Dataset Search is similar in concept to Google Scholar, which is widely used to find academic papers and research publications. Instead of focusing primarily on scholarly articles, the new service is designed specifically to locate datasets and information associated with them.

"Dataset Search lets you find datasets wherever they're hosted, whether it's a publisher's site, a digital library, or an author's personal web page," Natasha Noy, Research Scientist at Google AI, said in a blog post.

To make the service work effectively, Google developed guidelines that encourage dataset providers to describe their data using a common format. The information can include details such as who created the dataset, when it was published, how the data was collected and the conditions under which it can be used.

Google then gathers and connects this information to help users locate relevant datasets. The system can also identify different versions of the same dataset and find publications that refer to or analyse the data.

The company said datasets from environmental and social sciences would be among those searchable through the service, along with government information and data published by news organisations such as ProPublica. This could make the tool particularly useful for journalists and researchers who need reliable data to support investigations and analysis.

Google encouraged dataset providers, regardless of their size, to adopt its recommended standard so that more datasets can become part of a common and searchable ecosystem.

Dataset Search supports multiple languages, with Google planning to add support for more languages in the future. The service is expected to make the growing amount of publicly available data easier to discover and potentially open new avenues for research, journalism and data-driven analysis.