Show HN: Dataset Explorer – Free tool to search any public datasets
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Finding the right dataset shouldn't be this hard.
Millions of high-quality datasets exist across Kaggle, data.gov, and other platforms, but discovering the ones you actually need feels like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Whether it's seasonality trends, weather patterns, holiday data, tech layoffs, currency rates, political content, or geo information – the perfect dataset is out there, but buried under poor search functionality.
That's why we built the dataset-explorer – a completely free tool that lets you search for datasets using natural language across multiple platforms.
Just describe what you want to analyze, and it uses Perplexity, scraping (Firecrawl), and other tools behind the scenes to surface relevant datasets.
Instead of manually browsing through categories or dealing with limited search filters, you can simply ask "show me tech layoff data from the past 5 years" and get preview of multiple datasets.
Quick demo: I analyzed tech layoffs from 2020-2025 and uncovered some striking insights:
- 2023 was brutal – 264K layoffs (the peak year)
- Post-IPO companies led the cuts – responsible for 58% of all layoffs
- Hardware hit hardest – with Intel leading the charge
- January 2023 = worst month ever – 89K people lost their jobs in just 30 days
Once you find your dataset, you can analyze it completely free on Hunch . Try it yourself and let us know we can improve it for you.
Data explorer - https://hunch.dev/data-explorer
Demo link - https://screen.studio/share/bLnYXAvZ