Back in September 2018, Google launched its Dataset Search[1] tool, an engine which focuses on delivering results of hard data sources (research, reports, graphs, tables, and others) in a more efficient manner than the one which is currently offered by Google Search.
The service promises to enable easy access to the internet’s treasure trove of data. As Google’s Natasha Noy says,[2]
“Scientists, data journalists, data geeks, or anyone else can find the data required for their work and their stories, or simply to satisfy their intellectual curiosity.”
For SEOs, it certainly has potential as a new research tool for creating our own informative, trustworthy, and useful content. But what of its prospects as a place to be visible, or as a ranking signal itself?
Google Dataset Search: As a research tool
As a writer who has been using Google to search for data since about a decade, I’d agree that finding hard statistics on search engines is not always massively straightforward.
Often, data which isn’t the most recent ranks better than newer research. This makes sense in an SEO sense, that which was published months or years prior has had a long time to earn authority and traffic. But usually I need the freshest stats, and even search results pointing to data on a page that has been published recently doesn’t necessarily mean that the data contained in that page is from that date.
Additionally, big publications (think news sites like the BBC) frequently rank better than the domain where the data was originally published. Again, this is unsurprising in the context of search engines. The BBC et al. have far more traffic, authority, inbound links, and changing content than most research websites,