Singapore is a bad example. How about a (hypothetical) guy/gal learning ML from Coursera and living in a remote village in Indonesia? No way to go to college because it's simply too far and he/she has to support their family. The person stumbled upon Kaggle, and started to compete with the best in the world.
Only Kaggle has the full data to be able to make an accurate decision. I don't really think indexing account pages is even remotely enough to find the really talented people among the noise.
I think Google acquired Kaggle for one of the following two reasons: 1) they wanted to expand their talent acquisition reach[1], or 2) they wanted to build a platform like Kaggle aimed at Google Cloud, but figured out that it was just easier to acquire Kaggle itself.
[1]: Google will NEVER be satisfied with its talent pool given their size and rate of expansion. The company is prepared to do a ton -- perhaps even acquiring Kaggle -- to get the best of the best, wherever they are.
Re:Google is acquiring Kaggle
by thinkmassive on Friday March 10, 2017 @08:54PM
(#13843699)
If you own all the user data then you know you have access to, and control of, all of it.
Re:Google is acquiring Kaggle
by jonathankoren on Saturday March 11, 2017 @02:14PM
(#13846696)
But if you index it. You have it.
2) If Google is trying to recruit people from Kaggle accounts, why not simply index the accounts?
Neither approach requires purchasing Kaggle at all.