Today, we’re making available a new data set of nearly 3,000 financial grants awarded by Google to academic researchers. Google discloses its grants to academics on its website, but the disclosure pages are cumbersome to navigate and impossible to search by name. So we’ve created a searchable database for researchers to use.
In 2017, the Google Transparency Project published an investigation into Google's relationships with academics. That report and the accompanying database focused on scholars who wrote about public policy issues of interest to Google, like antitrust law, copyright issues, and privacy. It did not include the thousands of grants that Google gives to computer scientists and other academics.
But sometimes Google calls upon academics who work on seemingly apolitical issues to go to bat for the company. The new database will help shed light on these relationships.