A data search engine

May 26, 2011

Zanran is a new search engine that helps you find data.

It indexes items that have tables or figures that seem to display data.  It looks to be significantly more useful than a general search engine when it’s data you want.

Search results are displayed in the manner you are used to.  Except on the left side there is an icon that indicates the type of document.  Hovering over one of those icons shows you a sample of the document — a sample that includes what it suspects is relevant data.

For example, if you search for “equity risk premium”, you’re able to view a number of graphs of the equity risk premium in seconds.

Bugs

  1. Some items include “n more results from this site”.  This is meant to be a link to those results, but the link doesn’t work at the moment.  They’ve promised to fix it.
  2. If you search for “burns statistics”, it lists things having to do with statistics about burns, and hardly anything from my company.  How dare they.

Subscribe to the Portfolio Probe blog by Email

Leave a Reply

Related posts

  • September 9, 2011

    Mark Buchanan in The Physics of Finance has another great post called "Of hurricanes and economic equilibrium". The Efficient Market Hypothesis has been beaten up quite a lot lately, [...]

  • September 6, 2011

    Human logic is more like quantum logic than formal logic. The Physics of Finance in "Quantum thinking" points to an article in New Scientist (actually the cover piece) about [...]

  • September 4, 2011

    Deus Ex Macchiato has a brief post called "Prices as modified Schelling Points".  It is a cute little idea about how markets work. I had known of the concept [...]