In September of 2018, Google launched a new dataset search engine intended to help researchers pour through large datasets from public sources. These include everything from census data, demographics surveys, medical studies, and much more. The datasets are primarily for academic researchers to crunch numbers and extract patterns. But even for the regular layperson, some of the datasets are just fascinating to explore. How Google Dataset Searches Work For many years, one of the greatest weaknesses of Google’s search engine was that entire segments of an underground internet remained invisible. This internet remained “underground” because the information itself is unsearchable by Google’s web crawler.