Explore page - an introduction

Community Insight contains a wealth of data, and our easy search tools can help you find the data you need. From the Explore page you can explore by a certain geography, explore by topic or keyword, or browse recent additions to the site.

Search by Topic or Keyword

This search box works just like the quick search box that appears in the upper right corner of every page: simply type some keywords and the system will do its best to find what you wanted. You'll notice that when you click on the search box, it will pop up a box right below it that allows you to specify optional classification criteria to search at the same time. When you hit search, you will be taken to the advanced search page to see your results. You can further refine your search there.

Geographic Search

Click "Select Geographic Area" to pop up a widget that lets you set the area you want to search. There are multiple ways to set the area of interest. You can simply pan and zoom the map to the area you want, or you can click one of the two "Refine area" widgets. The first one lets you draw a box defining the area you want. The second lets you pick a dataset in your library. If you pick a dataset, its bounding box will be used to set the area of interest. Once you have set the area of interest, click the "Set This Filter Area" button to close the map widget.

Browsing

If you don't feel like searching, just use the Browse section of the page to look for things of interest. The "Show" menu lets you look for datasets, snapshots, or people. You can sort them by using the "Sort By" menu.

RSS Feeds

Like many pages on the site, the Explore page exposes RSS feeds so you can keep abreast of what is happening. Many RSS readers can determine what feeds are available just by being given the page's URL. Otherwise, you can click on the orange RSS icon to get the feed you want. Our RSS feeds expose GeoRSS and MediaRSS tags, so specialized feed readers can display the content in interesting ways.