Find data on data.world

After working through the tutorial you should be able to:

There is a search bar in the data.world header on most pages. When you enter the string bee colony in the search bar, notice that, even before hitting Enter to run the search, there is a drop down of the most popular results:

If a dropdown is presented as you type, you can either select one of the options on the dropdown or run the search. When you run the search, if you're in an organization you'll see all the items that are owned by you, the organization, or another member of the organization listed. You can also expand the scope of your search to include all public resources by selecting Include community results under the search bar. If you are not in an organization you'll see the community results by default:

On the left side of the screen there are other criteria you can use to restrict your results. These items are called facets. Facet choices are cumulative, and whenever you select one it automatically updates the availability of the others. You can read more about facets and other methods of filtering your results in our article on filtering search results.

By default when you do a search on data.world your results will include everything that matches your search: datasets, projects, tables, users, organizations, pdfs, charts, etc. Notice that each resource type has its own icon, making it easy to see if it's what you are looking for or not:

A list of the different icons and their associated resource types is found in our guide to icons.A guide to icons

If you are looking specifically for datasets you can can use the dropdown next to All resource types to restrict the search to data only:

In addition to straight text searches you can also use a variety of search operators to narrow down results. See our article on advanced search for details.

When you find data you would like to be able to find and reference easily later you can bookmark them by selecting the bookmark flag on the top right of the screen. The flag also shows you how many other people have bookmarked the same dataset:

The overview page of the dataset gives you a lot of information. On the right side you can see who it is shared with, who owns it, and when it was created. You can also see how many files and columns it contains, and how many virtual tables are linked to it. All of this information can be valuable in determining if the data meets your needs:

See our article on evaluating data for more information.Evaluating data from search results

There is a lot of information to be found on data.world, and we want to make that information as intuitive to access as possible. With all the data available, sometimes entering a simple string in the search bar--even with powerful filtering ability backing it--isn't enough to find what you need. For the times you need even more pin-point accuracy and complexity in your search terms we have a robust set of logical and data.world-specific operators to help you find just what you are looking for. In fact, with all the data that is available, you're not likely to have a problem finding what you need. It's more likely that the problem will be narrowing down the results from a search so you can focus on the resources that best meet your needs. Once you have a reasonable list of results from your search, you need to evaluate them to see which are appropriate for your project.

In this article we covered the basics of how to find and evaluate data, but there is a lot more you can do. The references linked in this article will provide more depth and detail on each of those topics.