One of the canonical examples of a big data competition was the Netflix prize data set. It seems to have disappeared from the Internet. Is that the case, or is it still accessible somewhere?
It appears that the Netflix data set is no longer available. According to the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository:
Note from donor regarding Netflix data: "Thank you for your interest in the Netflix Prize dataset. The dataset is no longer available." - http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/noteNetflix.txt
BUT WAIT, there's more... perhaps it is available as an archive - https://archive.org/details/nf_prize_dataset.tar
BUT WAIT, EVEN MORE, it is also up on the archive in its true form:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090925184737/http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Netflix+Prize
Another way to obtain the data:
http://academictorrents.com/details/9b13183dc4d60676b773c9e2cd6de5e5542cee9a
The training data is also now hosted on Kaggle. The per movie files are combined into 4 large txt files which is potentially more convenient. I'm not seeing the qualifying/test data anywhere, maybe Netflix never released that?
yeah, training data (nf_prize_dataset.tar.gz) is available, but testing data - no (grand_prize.tar.gz). even on https://web.archive.org/web/20090926031123/http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/netflix