Epidemic Modeling 101: Or why your CoVID19 exponential fits are wrong
“Over the past few weeks, a terrible affliction has been spreading across the world. Otherwise healthy and productive members of society have been infected with this devastating illness that causes them to fire up Excel, Python or R and start extrapolating the latest numbers of confirmed CoVID19 cases in their town, state, country or even the world!”
I wonder if learning multiple languages as a kid has any influence on the way we think (I was raised bilingual and now I can speak 4 languages quite fluently), but also if the way we think determines what we are good at and the path we choose to live. I'm an engineer and I always enjoyed doing math and science, whereas I'm not that pasionate about art and humanities. I know some people can be really great at both, but most of us will only shine on one of these fields.
The real cancer on society are religions. Not only they are totally useless, but they have been obstructing critical thinking and the progress of sciencific development for thousands of years.
Why do you say there is no business model in a search niche? StackOverflow and pleny of listing sites (Tripadvisor, Yelp, Zillow, Capterra to name a few) have been successfully built in this exact premise and the user experience of searching for restaurants, real state or software on these sites is usually much better than searching directly on Google due to the availability of custom filters and the amount of domain-specific metadata that the global search engines cannot read. While it's true that most of these sites heavily rely on SEO to drive inbound traffic from the big G, there is no doubt that they are perfectly viable businesses.
StackOverflow and those other sites aren't search engines. They may have search engines in them but not many people use them (the only time I reach StackOverflow, booking.com etc is via search engine referral). They're user content hosting and curation sites.
Technically you are correct, in the sense that they do not crawl the web like Google or Bing do. But from a user perspective, they do provide a very useful service of aggregation, discovery and comparison of structured data that is way more effective than using Google search queries, if you know the type of information you are looking for.
It's the corpus that matters, mostly. The StackExchange sites are Q&A formatted and with an SKG graph (such as in solr), you can do topic extraction on questions OR answers which then leads to being able to match other answers (with links) to other questions, among other things. With related topics, many other things come to life.
