Search the text in historical maps

The David Rumsey Map Collection has been home to tens of thousands of historical maps, and now you can search the collection by the text in the maps instead of just through metadata:

About 57,000 of the georeferenced maps from the collection have been processed with a machine learning tool called mapKurator to collect all the text on maps, i.e. every piece of text (printed or handwritten) that appears on a map, including place names, but also information like a map’s title or its scale, or the names of the people involved in producing the map. Through this process of automatic annotation, this approach turns the text on maps into structured data (text on maps data): the enormous amount of data that has been collected from these maps is now searchable.

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Google Maps incorrectly pointing people to crisis pregnancy centers

Davey Alba and Jack Gillum, for Bloomberg, found that Google Maps commonly points people to crisis pregnancy centers, non-medical locations that encourage women to follow through with pregnancy, when they search for “abortion clinic”.

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New shopping search patterns from the pandemic

Schema Design, Google Trends, and Axios collaborated on The New Normal, looking at how searches for certain products has changed since the pandemic started. Keywords were taken from Google’s product taxonomy, and search volumes are from Google Shopping.

From there, the keywords, compared to search from 2019, were categorized as a new normal, unusual, or about the same as before. They categorized the words manually instead of defining a metric, which surprised me. It seems like it would’ve been useful for sorting beyond alphabetical. Still interesting to poke at though.

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Exploring your Google search history

Search history can say a lot of about a person, like where they’re going, where they want to be, what they want to learn about, or what they’re trying to make — at some point in their life. Search Record, by Jon Packles, is a way to parse through your history. Download your archive, import it into the locally-run tool, and explore.

I’m more of DuckDuckGo person, so I can speak to the specificity of the tool, but it looks insightful. At the least, I’d want to download my search archive and play around with it.

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Political search interest in 2020

In Waves of Interest, a collaboration between the Google News Initiative and Truth & Beauty, see the defining search trends of 2020. See trends over time. See trends over geography. See trends over past election seasons.

See also how the work came together.

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This Age is the New Age

30 is the new 20. Wait. 40 is the new 20. No, scratch that. 50 is the new 20. Or is 50 the new 30? Here’s what the Google says, so you know it must be true.

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Search trends during the pandemic

As you would imagine, what we search for online shifted over the past few months. The unknowns push information gathering. Schema Design, in collaboration with the Google News Initiative and Axios, broke down the main changes in search since January.

Using a beeswarm chart, each circle represents a query and the size of a circle represents the rank in a query. I really wanted to mouse over the circles to see specifics, but maybe that would’ve been too much information in one view.

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Change in Google searches since the virus

The coronavirus changed what information we search for. Has anyone been more interested in making masks or hand sanitizer in the history of the world? For The Washington Post, Alyssa Fowers compares search rankings for how, where, what, and how the week of April 5 to 11, for 2019 against 2020.

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Google Dataset Search moves out of beta

Over a year ago, Google released Dataset Search in public beta. The goal was to index datasets across the internets to make them easier to find. It came out of beta:

Based on what we’ve learned from the early adopters of Dataset Search, we’ve added new features. You can now filter the results based on the types of dataset that you want (e.g., tables, images, text), or whether the dataset is available for free from the provider. If a dataset is about a geographic area, you can see the map. Plus, the product is now available on mobile and we’ve significantly improved the quality of dataset descriptions. One thing hasn’t changed however: anybody who publishes data can make their datasets discoverable in Dataset Search by using an open standard (schema.org) to describe the properties of their dataset on their own web page.

I haven’t tried it in a while, but the last time I did, there weren’t that many sources yet, because the indexing partially relies on others to use a standard to provide metadata. Kicking the tires on it now, it still kind of feels like an index of other dataset aggregators, but I’m interested.

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Google Dataset Search moves out of beta

Over a year ago, Google released Dataset Search in public beta. The goal was to index datasets across the internets to make them easier to find. It came out of beta:

Based on what we’ve learned from the early adopters of Dataset Search, we’ve added new features. You can now filter the results based on the types of dataset that you want (e.g., tables, images, text), or whether the dataset is available for free from the provider. If a dataset is about a geographic area, you can see the map. Plus, the product is now available on mobile and we’ve significantly improved the quality of dataset descriptions. One thing hasn’t changed however: anybody who publishes data can make their datasets discoverable in Dataset Search by using an open standard (schema.org) to describe the properties of their dataset on their own web page.

I haven’t tried it in a while, but the last time I did, there weren’t that many sources yet, because the indexing partially relies on others to use a standard to provide metadata. Kicking the tires on it now, it still kind of feels like an index of other dataset aggregators, but I’m interested.

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