You can do some cool stuff with the APIs and datasets the big companies provide. Most are typically priced per API call with generous free tiers. I expect thes

You can do some cool stuff with the APIs and datasets the big companies provide. Most are typically priced per API call with generous free tiers. I expect these will get cheaper. I'm working on a search engine for lectures (https://www.findlectures.com https://www.findlectures.com) - for ~30k API requests I've been able to do everything free. A lot of interesting large data sets are hosted in the "cloud" too for you to use for research, so you can get at them that way.