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Bing was my secret weapon when doing data science contracts that were MVPs or side features. Take a couple million preselected strings they needed to match to
by 3pt14159 7y ago
Bing was my secret weapon when doing data science contracts that were MVPs or side features.
Take a couple million preselected strings they needed to match to and then run them through Bing, page through the results, and build up the corpus I needed out of something like mechanize / nokogiri / headless browser.[0] Then clean up the data the normal data science way then do whatever mathy stuff I needed to layer on for whatever app they needed. There you go mister client something that has billions of dollars of R&D behind it and cleaned up for your specific use-case. You want something better? Go off and hire a team of Phds and spend a couple years and 50x the money I charged you to get your RoC curves (or whatever) looking 10% or 15% better.
Haven't done this in a couple years due to a startup and then after that randomly finding a client I liked working with so much I haven't needed to take on random jobs again, but I'm sure it would still work.
[0] I had also written custom tools to make this easier / saner. Also inspector gadget + CSS selectors goes a long way too.
- ineedasername 7y agoThat is not a scalable practice. You may have been able to do it, but if it became a too common a practice among developers making similar things then I'm sure Bing would have taken steps to limit such activity.
- 3pt14159 7y agoThat's why it was a secret weapon and not a "I told everyone how to do it" weapon. Also, lol, I spelled it "RoC curves" I clearly didn't proofread this.
- dr_zoidberg 7y agoI'm pretty sure that's how you spell it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris...
- 3pt14159 7y agoI mean, on a good day I capitalize the "O" in ROC.
- dr_zoidberg 7y agoOh right! Yeah, and now there are "roc" acronyms everywhere, like AMDs rocm or whatever, and I'm pretty sure I've seen a few other. Pretty easy to get confused. Edit: I knew I wouldn't get the capitalizaton right, AMD's is ROCm for "Radeon Open Compute" and who knows what the "m" stands for.
- _bxg1 7y agoI'm curious what about Bing made it specially suited for this?
- 3pt14159 7y agoAbsolutely fantastic rate limits (essentially a non-issue) and no captchas or other other annoyances. Reasonable enough data quality. It's no Google, but it's not bad if the search terms are for scientific concepts or similar.