6 5 - 18 February 2020
T
he web is a great source of data
from universities, governments
and research organisations, but
finding what you want using
traditional search methods isn’t
always easy. That’s why Google has
been encouraging institutions to
describe their datasets using
metadata and submit them for
inclusion in its new Dataset Search
tool, which is now out of beta. Type a
query such as “crime in London” or
“top paid television presenters” and
any available data appears in an
instant, placing close to 25 million
datasets at your fingertips.
The tool is aimed primarily at
academic researchers, business
analysts, students and data scientists,
but we found an abundance of links
to UK government and NHS-related
data in our own searches, as well as
lots of fun stats, including a dataset
of international football results from
1872 to 2019.http://www.onesearch.com
We’ve long been fans of DuckDuckGo, the search engine
that prides itself on not tracking you online. Now Verizon
Media, the company that owns Yahoo, has launched a rival
search engine called OneSearch, which also promises not to
track and store your search history or share your personal or
search data with advertisers. Not only does this allow
OneSearch to deliver
unfiltered search results
from Bing, it also means
you’ll see only contextual
adverts based on your
search terms rather than
targeted ads based on
your behaviour.
The engine’s
Advanced Privacy Mode
encrypts your search
terms, too, so the words
you enter won’t appear
in the URL of results. What’s more, your search results URL
expires within an hour for added security. Verizon promises
to release mobile apps soon, as well as versions of
OneSearch tailored to non-US countries.
bit.ly/protect
Some Google
accounts are more
likely to be targeted
by hackers than
others, so now the
technology giant has
made it easier to
protect them. Rather
than insisting that
users buy a physical
security key, Google
is allowing anyone who signs up for its Advanced
Protection Program to use their iPhone or Android
phone as a digital key.
Google says its Advanced Protection is aimed at high-risk
users such as journalists, activists, political campaigners,
executives and people who work in regulated industries.
Even if you don’t fit those categories, however, you can still
sign up and relax in the knowledge that your data is more
secure. The program does create limitations – for example,
only Google apps and some third-party tools can access
Gmail and Drive files – but it’s a reasonable trade-off if you
need the strongest protection against fraudulent access.You can filter the
results to reveal only
specific types of
dataset, such as
tables, documents,
images, text and
archive. You can also
narrow down the
information to the
past month, year or
three years and
perform searches on mobile devices,
so you’ll never be short of statisticalbackup for an argument.
datasetsearch.research.google.comBrowse 25 million datasets for free
Search the web more
privately
Better protect your Google
account
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