How to find data

Or at least a possible way of finding data.

Have you ever tried to find the raw data but kept getting news sources or beautiful dashboards instead of the raw data? Whenever I tried to find the John Hopkins coronavirus data, I either get news articles or I get the beautiful dashboard site, but I really wanted the data itself so I can play with it for study and learning purposes.

I have learned that searching on different machines can give different search results because the search engines learns about how you search and which result you choose so it can keep giving you the same type of results. When one machine isn’t giving me what I was looking for, I’ll usually go to another machine, work or home, to see if I can get a different result and quite often it will work.

Sometimes, if I wait a period of time – I’m talking months here, not hours – the search engines can cough up different search results.

But something like the John Hopkin coronavirus data is not likely to lend itself to giving me different results if I use a different machine (I have already tried that) because lots of people – news organizations, universities, regular people like me, etc. – are all searching for the John Hopkins coronavirus data and most likely they are not looking for the raw data. The beautiful dashboards will do.

Then a few days ago, when I was searching for the TSA check-in point data, I kept running into the same situation where I was getting just the news articles about the TSA check-in data and not the data itself. I kept telling myself, “No, I want the data itself” and then “bing!”, a lightbulb turned on and I had an idea.

I realized I needed to say something like “TSA data” and BINGO, that worked. Duh!

So I tried using John Hopkins coronavirus data and BINGO, that worked. Of course, I had to scroll down the page past the news article links and past the dashboard links, but there it was at the bottom – the link to the data itself.

So lesson learned: try tacking on the word “data” or maybe even “data repository” to see if the search engine gives you something new. Also, check to see if a GitHub site comes up – there is a good chance that the data is residing in GitHub.