The Top 20 Websites to Access Free Data for Practice

Whether you’re conducting market research, building your portfolio as an analyst, or seeking insights to expand your market reach, valuable and reliable data is essential for informed decision-making.

However, searching the internet for free, reliable, and accessible data has some challenges. This article will make your data-hunting quest less challenging by introducing you to some of the top websites to access free data.

Google Trends is a free service developed by Google that provides users with unfiltered data samples of search requests made to Google. While this service displays time series data from 2004 to the present at both global and city-level scales, it doesn’t show the personal details of the search engine users.

You can also restrict the data to focus on categories, languages, entities, or trending searches on Google with Google Trends. Examples of available data include daily search trends and real-time search trends, which show data for the past seven days.

FiveThirtyEight is a data journalism website that has data about poll analysis, sports, pop culture, politics, science, and economic happenings.

The great thing about the website is that you can download the data from their website or their official GitHub repository and use your data visualization tools to create captivating data journalism visuals for your audience. A few examples of interesting data available include the world cup predictions and 2022-23 NHL predictions data.

BuzzFeed News is an American breaking news and original reporting platform that reports everything from journalism, tech, entertainment, celebrity news, culture, and DIY hacks to health and politics.

On its GitHub, BuzzFeed News makes its dataset, tools, and analysis from BuzzFeed’s newsroom open-source, accessible, and available. An example includes the FBI NICS firearm background check data.

Data.gov is the United States government’s open data website that hosts over 250,000 publicly available, well-documented datasets from international and multiple federal government agencies. The idea behind this initiative was to provide an open and transparent government.

You can access data from the website based on topic and agency or organization. Some examples of data you can find on Data.gov is the national student loan data system and electric vehicle population data.

Kaggle is a public data playground acquired by Google that offers a wide range of datasets on various topics. This community platform allows you to share your codes, learn, collaborate with fellow data professionals, and skill up. Kaggle also hosts data science competitions where you can win various prizes.

This guide provides a beginner’s guide on how to get started with Kaggle for data science. An example is the Global YouTube Statistics 2023.

EarthData is a data initiative by NASA serving as a repository of earth data from 1994 to now. You can get data related from the remote satellite information to data about the Earth’s atmosphere, ocean, and Terrestrial Hydrosphere.

You can browse various topics and access data like extreme heat data. However, you will have to explore NASA’s planetary data system for non-earth data.

IMDb provides data about movies, TV series, home videos, podcasts, video games, streaming information, and celebrity content. An example is IMDb non-commercial datasets.

AWS Public Dataset is a website that hosts over 3000 data sets of datasets made publicly available through AWS services. Most of the datasets here are project-based. A few include the cancer genome atlas and Foldingathome COVID-19 Datasets.

Inside Airbnb is a watchdog website launched by Murray Cox. This website sources data publicly available from Airbnb, a platform that offers users budget-friendly rooms worldwide. You can use information from this site to carry out analytics like the rental analytics of Montreal.

Google Dataset Search is a dataset search engine created by Google that hosts over 20 million datasets. Like their search engine, you can get data from almost anything. A good example is the Canadian national long-term water quality monitoring data.

UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository is the home of 624 datasets for the machine learning community in the world. This website has a strong reputation in the community because the datasets are categorized based on the machine learning tasks they are suited for. An example is the Iris dataset, a famous classification and clustering model dataset.

Datahub as a platform has many datasets that cover a wide range of topics like the 10-year US Government Bond Yields (long-term interest rate). Besides the data, they also display data tools and toolkits that can come in for data professionals.

This is the first website on our list for exclusive health data. The Global Health Observatory serves as a data repository displaying health-related statistics for over 1000 indicators for the WHO’s 194 member states. The data are recorded to monitor these member states’ progress toward SDG goals. You can get data by filtering the theme, category, metadata, and indicator of the data.

This platform is really niche based. It shows research data and market intelligence information like the weekend box office figures and related data on the UK film industry.

GitHub is more than just the home of millions of collaborative and open-source projects. The platform also hosts many repositories that aim to hold free, public, and open-source datasets. Even BuzzFeedNews has an open-source GitHub repository.

Other examples are the Awesome Public Datasets repository and do you even lift the dataset. You can also contribute to these open-source projects on GitHub.

Data.world is a data community and collaborative platform that hosts data projects and datasets. While a few datasets are paid, majorly of the data on the platform, like Makeover Monday’s 2021/W16: monthly air passengers in America, are free and can be easily downloaded locally or accessed via their API.

World Bank Open Data is a catalog of global economic and development data. You can browse and filter the data, like the global statistics on the cost and affordability of healthy diets by indicator and country.

Nasdaq Data Link is for everything financial, economic, and alternative data. You can access data like the US federal reserve data releases via a spreadsheet like Excel or an API.

NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission data platform records and hosts information such as yellow and green taxi trip records across New York City. The great thing about this website is that it shows information about everything, from the pick-up/drop-off to the taxicab zone and trip fares.

Academic Torrents is a data catalog of over 127.15 TB of research data. It was built, as they say, for researchers and by researchers.

Explore and Learn

Hopefully, with this list, you can get data that can shape your business landscape, drive your market research, gain a competitive edge, and help you build that unique data portfolio free of charge. So embrace the opportunities, explore, and have a less challenging data-hunting quest.