Google is acquiring data science company Kaggle

For those unaware, Kaggle is a data science platform that gives access to tutorials while also hosting various coding competitions for its users. Your score in these competitions is listed on your personal profile page, and can be used as a resume of sorts once you have enough under your belt. In this vein, it might be appropriate to describe Kaggle as a mish-mash between Code Academy and LinkedIn, showing potential employers exactly what you know about and how good at it you are. Now, with Google’s Cloud Next conference in full swing, rumors began circulating stating that Google is in the process of acquiring the company.

TechCrunch said that they had internal sources validating the status of this rumor, and when the site reached out to Kaggle CEO Anthony Goldbloom, he declined to deny the claims. When Google was contacted regarding the deal, it responded that it does not comment on rumors. Just today however, Google released an official statement confirming the rumors, saying it is indeed working to acquire Kaggle.

Kaggle was founded in 2010, and since then has put over 500,000 data scientists on the platform. While there are a few other services currently on the market that offer much of the same services, Kaggle’s ease of use and colorful UI managed to keep it far ahead of its competitors. The company teamed up with Google to host a huge $100,000 machine learning competition just earlier this month, which tasked users to create software that could correctly classify YouTube videos.

Sources say that Google will likely keep the company intact when the acquisition is complete, and is more interested in the community which the site has fostered over the years rather than the platform itself.

Do you use this website yourself? Do you think Google could do a lot to further the community is has created?

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