30 Free and Powerful Big Data Sources for Your Research

Updated on July 2nd, 2018 by Quertime Writer in Search Engines

Big data analytics is big business in today’s business environment. But where you do get the data to perform big data analytics? You need not collect your own data for the purpose as there are numerous websites that offer free data sets.

This data is available for use and analysis to anyone who in interested in the task. In this article, we reveal 30 global free and powerful big data sources that you can browse and make use of.

1. The BROAD Institute provides an array of datasets related to the various cancer types and their treatments.

2. Pew Research Center gives raw data gleaned from in its in-depth research on various aspects of American life.

3. The Ohio State University has a Financial Data Finder that provides a huge catalog of data sets related to finance.

4. UCI Machine Learning Repository offers a dataset that provides information on machine learning and its various uses.

5. Million Song Data Set is owned by Amazon Web Services and offers metadata on more than a million pieces of music types including popular songs.

6. New York Times offers an indexed and searchable archive containing news articles published in the newspaper going all the way back to the year 1851.

7. DBPedia: Wikipedia is a comprehensive database that hosts millions of unstructured and structured data pieces on a wide array of subjects. DBPedia catalogs this data and offers a free distributable database to allow users to analyze this information.

8. US National Climatic Data Center offers a vast collection of climate, meteorological, and environmental data sets. This database is considered to be the biggest archive of weather-related data in the world.

9. Google Books Ngrams: This database allows you to find and analyze millions of digitized books. This initiative has been created by the Google Books Project.

10. Google Finance: This database offers data on stock markets going back to 40 years and it constantly receives real-time updates.

11. Google Trends: Provides statistics on the search volume for all terms going back to 2004.

12. Gapminder: This database offers data collected from the World Bank and the World Health Organization and includes social, medical, and economics stats from across the world.

13. Junar is a service for data scraping that also provides data feeds.

14. Google Public Data Explorer offers economics data from human development indicators, OECD, and global development indicators.

15. Qlik Data Market: You can get data on the automobile, agriculture and food, healthcare, and economics industries.

16. UCLA Statistics: You can get data on the courses taught in UCLA.

17. Facebook Graph: Offers data on Facebook users. Not all of the information on Facebook profiles is private because some users opt to share their info with the world and many don’t know how to make use of the privacy options.

18. Amazon Web Services Public Datasets: Huge collection of data, including NASA’ s satellite imageries of our planet as well as the 1000 Genome Project which collects information on human genetics.

19. World Health Organization: You can get information and stats on global health, disease, and hunger.

20. UNICEF: Provides info and stats on the situation and health of children and women worldwide.

21. NHS Health and Social Care Information Center: Offers health data collected by the National Health Service in the UK.

22. Healthdata.gov: This database offers data on US healthcare including population and epidemiology stats and Medicare data going back 125 years.

23. The CIA World Factbook provides information on the military, infrastructure, government, economy, population, and history of all the countries in the world.

24. Opengovernmentdata.org offers public government info and data from the US, Canada, EU, CKAN, and others.

25. Canada Open Data: This pilot project hosts numerous geospatial and government datasets.

26. Data.gov.uk: This database provides data obtained from the UK government, and includes the British National Bibliography. You can get metadata on publications and books published in the UK since 1950.

27. European Union Open Data Portal: Offers data obtained from EU institutions.

28. US Census Bureau: Provides information on US citizens and includes education, geographic, and population data.

Conclusion

This collection of free data sources is only a drop in the ocean. Many companies, apps, and websites that provide an API give access to the information and data collected through their API. If your company does not have the budget and resources to collect your own data, you can make use of this public data to ask questions and get relevant answers. Feel free to share your ideas and opinions on how your company plans to make use of public data in your industry or business.