A good search engine for data would make the web more enlightening. Lack of a good business model may be keeping users in data darkness.

Which is a better, one big table, or two or more smaller tables?  The organization of the data sources, the number of smaller tables, the extent of the relationships between the smaller tables, and economies in table processing all affect the balance of advantage.  But cheaper storage, cheaper computing power, and fancier data tools probably [...]

Sometimes tables are messy not just in their data items, but also in the fields that define the table columns.[1]  Various techniques help to deal with such “second order” messiness.  Sorting table fields alphabetically or evaluating them with more powerful text similarity measures help to identify inadvertently duplicated fields.   Sorting table fields by the [...]

Even in this age of big data, most persons collect data in spreadsheets.  Two challenges are common with spreadsheet data, particularly spreadsheet data collected from a variety of sources.  First, you need to understand what numbers you have.  That means both the definition of a specific number and the presence or absence of particular numbers.  [...]