Google made it public last week that they released a new tool, Dataset Search, that will make it easier to discover datasets.

This tool will make it easier for researchers to find data related to a wide variety of topics wherever it’s hosted.

In the screenshot below it can be seen that the tool gives detailed information on things like, when the data was published, where, by who, licensing, etc.

Google also released a thorough guide on how publishers should mark up their data to make it more likely that they will get featured in the Dataset Search.

The guide outlines some examples of what can qualify as datasets, some of them being, a table with data and images capturing data.

If your data is not original you still have a chance to show up in this search, granted that you mark it up correctly and in this case also specify that the data is the same as what was featured elsewhere or based on another publisher’s data.

Why Should You Care?

In a very content driven industry we obviously rely heavily on data from reliable sources to give our work more authority which makes this tool very exciting from a research for writing perspective. Especially as more and more people start to use the correct markup to enable their content being featured on this platform as well.

This brings us to the other side of the coin of why you should care. If you are publishing original (or even sourced data) and you mark your content up correctly, this could be another way to get some more eyes on your content and in an environment that has more authority than normal organic search.

Tags: content, Content writing, google, Google Dataset Search, original data