Google launches new search engine to help scientists find the datasets they need

The service, called Dataset Search, launches today, and will be a companion of sorts to Google Scholar, the company’s popular search engine for academic studies and reports. Institutions that publish their data online, like universities and governments, will need to include metadata tags in their webpages that describe their data, including who created it, when it was published, how it was collected, and so on. This information will then be indexed by Dataset Search and combined with input from Google’s Knowledge Graph. (That’s the name for those boxes that pop up for common searches. So if dataset X was published by CERN, some info about the institute will also be included in the results.)