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Kaggle is pretty important in the data-science community, providing a way to test and prove your skills - your Kaggle competition performance sometimes comes up in job interviews for AI/ML positions.Īfter these competitions, the datasets are made available for use. Organizations use Kaggle to post a prompt (like Cassava Leaf Disease Classification) and teams all over the world will compete against each other to solve it using algorithms (and win some prize money). Kaggle is a popular data-science competition website that provides free public datasets you can use to learn artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). It’s good to be aware of your other options. Just keep in mind that the Google graveyard - which is a phenomenon where Google cancels a service or product with little warning - is an ever-present danger for Google products big and small. Since it’s a Google product, the search function is powerful, but if you need to really get specific, it has a ton of filters to narrow down results.Īs a go-to for finding free public datasets, you can’t do much better than Google Dataset Search right now. Google Dataset Search has the most datasets out of all the options listed here, with 25 million datasets available when it left beta in January 2020. But if you want to stay focused and find what you need, it’s important to understand the nuances of each source and utilize their strengths to your advantage.Īs its name implies, Google Dataset Search is “ a search engine for datasets,” whose main audience includes data journalists and researchers. Overall, they’re great services, and you can spend a lot of time going down cool rabbit holes. 7 Sources for Free Datasets Anyone Can UseĪll of these dataset sources have strengths, weaknesses, and specialties. Here are a few great sources for free data and a few ways to determine their quality. Before you get too crazy, though, you need to be aware of the quality of the data you find.
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There is a lot of free data out there, ready for you to use for school projects, for market research, or just for fun.
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And you can do some pretty cool things with that data, like finding the answer to the question: Does Buffalo, New York, really get that cold in the winter? If “ data is the new oil,” then there’s a lot of free oil lying around just waiting to get used.
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