• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 31, 2018

Google announced Tuesday that it is working with news organizations to serve up more data from projects done by data journalists in its search results. The idea is to make it easier to search and find data that organizations produce and provide it in an easy-to-read format in search results.

The data is made possible by the dataset's markup scheme in Google search results.

Google is working with news organizations such as ProPublica, which has been testing the structured data in a format required for its search index.

“As a news organization that is focused on having real-world impact, it’s very much in our mission to give people information at the point of need,” wrote Scott Klein, the deputy managing editor of ProPublica, in the blog post. “If we can make the data we’ve worked hard to collect and prepare available to people at the very moment when they’re researching a big life decision, and thereby help them make the best decision they can, it’s an absolute no-brainer for us. And the code is trivial to add.”

In a document linked to the post, Google outlines examples of qualifying datasets such as a table or a CSV file with some data, an organized collection of tables, a file in a proprietary format that contains data, a collection of files that together constitute some meaningful dataset, and a structured object with data in some other format that you might want to load into a special tool for processing.

The list also includes images capturing data and files relating to machine learning, such as trained parameters or neural network structure definitions, and anything that looks like a dataset.

Google explains that it is also exploring experimental support for structured data based on W3C CSVW, and expects to adapt the approach as best practices for dataset description emerge.