Data and Analytics Tips and Tricks
Introduction
This will be an ever-growing list of tips and tricks that I have found useful.
Open Source
Tip: Quickly find open-source data from local governments
'site:hub.arcgis.com' also works for ESRI Hub sites that many entities use to host open data.
This is one that I use fairly often, and it involves some simple Google majors.
Most local governments that have open data leverage a platform now owned by Tyler Technologies called Socrata, host the data with ESRI services, or host the data on their own sites. In any case, they often follow a similar naming convention. It is usually something like www.data.city.gov.
So, to find open data quickly, you can use the Google search site: and wildcard * operators.
For example, site:data.*.gov will return all results from any government site that has a subdomain of data.
You can also use the inurl: operator to search for specific terms in the URL. For example, inurl: open data will return all results that have open data in the URL.
To narrow down the results even further, you can simply add to the search parameters. For example, site:data.*.gov crime or inurl:opendata inurl:crime. You can also add other keywords like the city name, county, or type of data you are looking for.