Google has unveiled a search engine to help researchers locate online data that is freely available for use. The company launched the service on 5 September, saying that it is aimed at “scientists, data journalists, data geeks, or anyone else”.
Dataset Search, now available alongside Google’s other specialized search engines, such as those for news and images — as well as Google Scholar and Google Books — locates files and databases on the basis of how their owners have classified them. It does not read the content of the files themselves in the way search engines do for web pages.
