Have you ever felt frustrated when trying to look for some data on Google? Pages of relevant websites but none can fulfill your expectations? Have you ever felt that your articles are less persuasive without data support?
Let’s put this article on your favorite list, the most comprehensive guide of data sources, including General Data, Government Data, Market Data for U.S. and China, etc.
General Data
World Health Organization offers data and analysis on global health priorities, like world hunger, health, and disease.
The Broad Institute offers a number of data sets in biology and medicine.
Amazon Web Service is a cross-science cloud-based data platform concerning Chemistry, Biology, Economy, and so on. It is also an attempt to build the most comprehensive database of human genetic information and NASA’s database of satellite imagery of Earth.
4. Figshare
Figshare is a platform for sharing research results. Here, you would be able to see some amazing findings from amazing people around the globe.
5. UCLA
Sometimes UCLA shares some of its findings in research papers.
6. UCI Machine Learning Repository
This website currently maintains 394 data sets as a service to the machine-learning community
7. Github
Some cool guys built the GitHub community, sharing a bunch of awesome data sets. Now the data inside is offered by everyone and offered to everyone.
Pew Research Center offers its raw data from its fascinating research into American life.
Government Data
9. Data.gov
Data.gov is the home of the U.S. government’s open data. You could find data, tools and resources here to conduct research, data visualization, etc.
10. US Census Bureau
US Census Bureau is a wealth of information on the lives of US citizens covering population data, geographic data and education.
Open Data Network is an easy-searching website for you to find government-related data, with nice visualization tools built-in.
12. European Union Open data portal
The European Union Open Data is for accessing a growing range of data from the European Union Institution.
13. Canada Open Data
Canada Open Data enables you to get quick, easy access to the government of Canada’s most requested services and information.
This website provides visitors with great open government data from the US, EU, Canada, CKAN, and more.
The World Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities.
16. Gov.uk
Gov.uk is the data from the UK Government, including the British National Bibliography – metadata on all UK books and publications since 1950.
17. Health Data.gov
Health Data Gov is dedicated to making high-value health data more accessible to entrepreneurs, researchers, and policymakers in the hopes of better health outcomes for all. It has 125 years of US healthcare data including claim-level Medicare data, epidemiology and population statistics.
18. UNICEF
Unicef offers statistics and reports on the situation of children worldwide.
19. National Climatic Data Center
National Climatic Data Center is a huge collection of environmental, meteorological and climate data sets from the US National Climatic Data Center. The world’s largest archive of weather data.
Market Data
It includes data from world development indicators, OECD, and human development indicators, mostly related to economics data and the world.
21. Google Trends
It provides Statistics on search volume (as a proportion of total search) for any given term, since 2004.
22. Google Finance
You can find 40 years’ worth of stock market data, updated in real-time.
E-commerce Platforms
23. Amazon
24. eBay
Two of the biggest e-commerce platforms in the U.S., listing tons of products for customers. In the meanwhile, offers product information for marketers and researchers for analyses.
25. Yelp
Many restaurants are listed on this website, customers do reviews about restaurants and these reviews can help other customers choose which restaurants to dine. Also, restaurant information and customer reviews are extremely valuable for a marketer to study.
26. Yellowpages
Yellowpages is a big brand even before we entered the Internet era. The website offers business info.
27. Cars
This website provides car info, both used cars and new cars. Also including the owner’s contact info.
Real Estate
28. Real Estate
29. Zillow
30. Realtor
These three websites list houses, and apartments that are on sale or for rent, and offer very comprehensive housing info.
31. Trip Advisor
A platform for customers to review great hotels around the world. It allows visitors to find the best hotels for vacation through reviews, and these reviews are very worthy of studying if you’re in the hotel industry.
32. Glassdoor
A recruiting website, listing thousands of vacant positions. Information extracted can be used for labor cost studying.
33. Linkedin
The best social media for formal communication. Thousands of users are registered, and user profiles are quite convincing. Very useful for people to try to find a job, or get some sales leads.
Chinese Market
As we all know, China is a market with huge potential, so I also listed some websites to get Chinese Market Data.
Real Estate
34. www.58.com （58同城）
35. www.anjuke.com （安居客）
36. www.qfang.com （Q房网）
37. Fang.com （房天下）
These websites gather comprehensive data on real estate in China. The blooming of China’s real estate market makes the housing price a hot spot for society, these sites offer massive and reliable data for people doing their research about real estate in China.
E-commerce Platforms
38. JD.com
39. Tmall.com
40. Taobao.com
China’s E-commerce companies supply massive products to the world, many gadgets are imported from China, and they swept over the globe, so how do China’s E-commerce platform look like? Ain’t you guys curious about?
Car Markets
41. www.autohome.com.cn（汽车之家）
China has always been a market with huge potential that every car manufacturer wants to seize. The best website for market researchers to collect data is AUTO HOME, which gathers tons of data and consumer reviews, best for Chinese car market analysis.
42. www.zuche.com（神州租车）
43. www.1hai.cn（一嗨租车）
These two websites lead the China Car rental market. Collecting car usage information can help you conduct analyses relevant.
Transportation, Hotel, Travel
44. www.ctrip.com （携程网）
45. www.qunar.com（去哪儿网）
Extract data from these websites, you’ll be able to get knowledge of how transportation, hotel, and travel markets are going in China.
Catering Market
46. www.dianping.com（大众点评）
47. www.meituan.com（美团网）
The above websites are similar to Yelp, and due to the richer and richer Chinese people are getting, these sites comment quality is relatively high because people are getting pickier.
Recruiting Websites
48. www.lagou.com（拉勾网）
49. www.zhaopin.com（智联招聘）
50. www.51job.com（前程无忧）
Bonus
Octoparse: Technically it’s not a data source, but it’s a good website that you can obtain data from. It offers a web scraping tool and data collection service.
These websites gain thousands of undergraduate users every year, for offering great jobs. My idea of extracting data from these sites, we can learn the market demands of certain industries.
Nowadays it’s a world of information integration, data sources shown above are just the tip of the iceberg. Since we are entering the big data era, it’s no more about utilizing the data, we move forward, conversely, it’s about if we don’t utilize the data, we fall back. As an ancient Chinese proverb says, “He who does not advance loses ground.”
