I love that they make their traffic numbers available. I have been using ddg and graphing/predicting the next days traffic since March here: https://qunc.co/ddg.
Definitely a different trajectory since late summer.
I don't want to hijack or anything, but just want to also link to a project I did that also looked at these ads and lets you browse/categorize them interactively: https://qunc.co/russia_facebook_project/
Some stats about the data set:
There were 3,419 ads.
They had approximately 40 million impressions.
Approximately 3.7 million clicks.
And, surprisingly to me, cost only around 117,000 USD in total
I remember 10 years ago Nuance used legal threats to eliminate competition in this field, to the extent that greatly discouraged any startup speech recognition companies.
Google was able to get around it, just because they became heavier..
This is my thought as well. So you fit a curve to a sorted list of each employees sick time. Does this give you any additional insight? So it follows a log function. Does that mean anything?
If you do a histogram and fit a function you get something that could conceivably be interpreted as a probability distribution function, you might be able to say something about predicting the sick time a given employee will take and the uncertainty of your prediction.
But I honestly don't see what visualizing the data in the method of the post, or fitting a function to it contributes. Hope that doesn't violate the new no negativity policy of HN.
Overall it was a good experience. Our attrition (already low) didn't increase, we kept our office and most of our culture, we grew the team and increased our sales many folds. Now we are part of Watson which is pretty exciting. Obviously there also downsides related to being in a big company - the biggest being that you have uber forces beyond your control rocking the big ship.
Definitely a different trajectory since late summer.