This site is a lightweight semi-functional rebuild (in 2026) of Thingful, a search engine for the Internet of Things that operated from 2013 until it was sunsetted in 2022.
Thingful provides a unique geographical index of searchable real-time data from connected objects around the world, drawing from dozens of IoT networks and infrastructures, including energy, radiation, weather, and air quality devices as well as seismographs, ships, aircraft and even animal trackers. Where conventional search engines index documents and web pages, Thingful indexes connected IoT devices and the real-time data streams they generate, making it possible to search across the physical world's growing network of sensors, monitors, and networked objects.
If you are concerned about asthma, you can find air quality monitors in your neighbourhood; somebody working with a Raspberry Pi can find others round the corner using the same computing platform; if you notice a ship moored nearby, you can discover more about it by tracking it on Thingful; a citizen concerned about flooding in a new neighbourhood can look up nearby flood monitors or find others that have been measuring radiation. You might even watch the movements of a shark as it explores the oceans.
Indexed IoT networks and data sources currently include OpenChargeMap, Sensor.Community, Windy Webcams, OpenAQ, USGS Earthquakes, Smart Citizen, Netatmo, Environment Agency UK, Movebank, PVOutput, AQICN, openSenseMap, INMET Brazil, MET Norway, NOAA CO-OPS, NOAA NDBC, NASA AERONET, and bike-share networks via GBFS; weather overlays use RainViewer, OpenWeatherMap, and Open-Meteo, with more added regularly.
Thingful also indexes IoT data from iBeacons, wildlife via satellite-tagged animal trackers (including sharks, migratory birds, and marine mammals) and icebergs and ocean buoys tracked by research agencies. Energy monitoring devices, home automation hardware, and citizen science platforms such as Raspberry Pi deployments are also part of the index.
A core problem Thingful addressed was fragmentation. By 2013, a large number of IoT data platforms existed independently of one another, with no common way to search across them. Thingful's Datapipes feature built a semantic layer on top of the index: a thesaurus of connected object types that could reconcile the same device named differently across different corporate, community, national and institutional IoT platforms in order to pipe real-time IoT search results to a variety of endpoints including Google spreadsheets, 3rd party applications or an email address.
The range of sources makes Thingful useful across a broad range of contexts. A resident concerned about air quality can locate nearby sensors from several networks simultaneously and compare readings. Someone building a flood early-warning tool can find what river level monitors already exist in a given area before deploying new hardware. Urban planners and researchers can survey what sensor infrastructure is already in place across a city. Educators and students can use the platform to find and experiment with live open data from around the world without needing to know in advance which networks hold it. Thingful even demonstrates that you can predict temperature in neighbourhoods without temperature sensors, just by looking at data from other nearby connected devices.
Thingful originally also allowed device owners to claim and verify ownership of their connected objects, giving them a single page aggregating data from all their devices regardless of which network each was on. The platform supported both public and private data, and developed tools for data owners to control how their data can be discovered and accessed by others. For 3rd party developers, an API enabled real-time discovery and interoperability for connected objects, based on an entitlement matrix that enabled data owners to make data available only in ways that they chose to (e.g. confined to accesses from specific IP ranges or geolocation; from specific periods, or at specific resolution; varying levels of anonymity, etc.)
For more on Thingful's development over the years see the Thingful Blog and to see things that were built using Thingful see Thingful Showcase.
Thingful aims to be the Google of the Internet of Things - Telecoms
Thingful in Wired's Connective iPad / Kindle special IoT publication
Thingful upgrades its search engine for the internet of things - GigaOm
The Internet of Things Is More than Just a Bunch of Refrigerators - Harvard Business Review
Thingful, a map to navigate the ocean of the Internet of Things - Makery
Thingful site brings linked Internet of Things to life - New Scientist
Thingful aims to be the Google of IoT - Digitalisation World
Thingful was created and largely funded by Umbrellium, a London-based urban technology design studio founded by Usman Haque, who had earlier founded Pachube, one of the earliest IoT data platforms. Thingful spun out as an independent company in 2014. Umbrellium's work focused on the relationship between networked infrastructure, public space and urban interaction, and Thingful emerged from that context, specifically from the recognition that while IoT data infrastructure had grown considerably, there was no practical way for people to find and make use of what had intentionally been made publicly available.
At launch, Thingful was the world's first search engine of its kind for the Internet of Things. The category has since grown considerably, with numerous IoT search and discovery tools now in existence.
Beyond the search engine itself, Thingful's interoperability and discoverability technologies contributed to several larger projects: the EU Horizon 2020 DECODE Project, which gave individuals control over whether and how their personal data remained private or was shared for public benefit; the GROW Observatory, a citizen science initiative focused on soil health and climate; and a connected vehicle data project funded by the UK's Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles. The team also contributed to the authoring of British Standard PAS 212, a specification for automatic resource discovery for the Internet of Things.
Thingful also received funding support from Innovate UK, the Open Data Incubator for Europe - ODINE, and the Open Data Institute among other sources.