Kaggle can bring out unknown or underprivileged gems into the spotlight. I remember reading an article about a top performer on Kaggle who was a school teacher somewhere in SE Asia (Singapore?).

1) Why do you believe that the hypothetical Singaporean isn't going to apply to Google? Google has no shortage of applicants. And if the applicant believes that Kaggle could help them, whey not simply put the score on the application / resume?

2) If Google is trying to recruit people from Kaggle accounts, why not simply index the accounts?

Neither approach requires purchasing Kaggle at all.

Singapore is a bad example. How about a (hypothetical) guy/gal learning ML from Coursera and living in a remote village in Indonesia? No way to go to college because it's simply too far and he/she has to support their family. The person stumbled upon Kaggle, and started to compete with the best in the world.

Only Kaggle has the full data to be able to make an accurate decision. I don't really think indexing account pages is even remotely enough to find the really talented people among the noise.

I think Google acquired Kaggle for one of the following two reasons: 1) they wanted to expand their talent acquisition reach[1], or 2) they wanted to build a platform like Kaggle aimed at Google Cloud, but figured out that it was just easier to acquire Kaggle itself.

[1]: Google will NEVER be satisfied with its talent pool given their size and rate of expansion. The company is prepared to do a ton -- perhaps even acquiring Kaggle -- to get the best of the best, wherever they are.

If you own all the user data then you know you have access to, and control of, all of it.

But if you index it. You have it.