Posts Tagged ‘calamity’

Google and Tsunami

Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

I found this post in one of my earlier blogs


Google has become synonymous with web search. Often, we read about the change in the page ranking mechanism, the change in the number of pages crawled by the search engine and so on. In my current job, we heavily rely on Google to check for names, places, terminologies, and just about any entity which is not clear in the fax. Over the years, I find that I have my own set of tips for better search results and on deriving a conclusion over the various searches. For example, if there is a doubt over a word usage and Merriam Websters does not have that word simply because it is a new word, or because it is another business expression I would check the word in Google and the higher the hits, the more the usage. For example, the word “Screenshot”. This word wasn’t found in Websters, but we use that often. So what do I do? I check in Google for single word and 2 words. I would go for whichever returns the greater number of hits.
But, in spite of this, I wasn’t aware of the patterns that could be found in such searches. The most recent example was my search for the word “tsunami”. Just 2 days after the disaster, I was trying to collect information about it, and the search returned approx 4 million hits. Two or three few days later, as I was browsing, I impulsively tried the search again, and guess what I found? This time it was around 7 million hits. Till now, I have no clue as to where I got this idea of checking for the number of hits. About a week after the disaster, it was at 17,500,000. I was amazed at this kind of increase in the number of hits. I had expected to go up, but never expected it to be so much. Ten days after the disaster it came to 20,500,000. Today, January 11, 2005 – just over 2 weeks – it is at 27 million hits.
How far would it go? Will have to wait and see.
Well the upward trend continues and just 2 days later, January 13, it is at 30 million pages. I am now quite positive of seeing a tenfold increase before the month is over.
Today – January 21, 2005 – it is at 37,700,000

….that was the post… I chked it today and guess what …it is at 105,000,000 (June 27, 2006)

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The day the calm and beautiful sea boiled over

Monday, December 27th, 2004

December 26 was a day that redefined life for millions of people. It was a day in which people, not just those directly affected, realized the volatile nature of life on earth. It was the day in which many of our ideas on life and the nature of the sea changed forever. For most of us, the beach is the favorite hangout and there could be nothing more splendid than the sea.
Approx 10 minutes was all that it took for this change and the cause was the tsunami that ravaged the coasts of a number of Southeast Asian countries including our coast. The body count is rising by the tens of thousands each passing day. Today it was 1.75 lakhs (175,000) and it has come so far from the initial estimate of 10,000 which now, pales in comparison. Obviously nobody had expected so much damage to be caused thousands of miles away from the epicenter.
We rarely get to see the violent side of the sea, hence it came as a surprise to a large number of people along the coast, they had not recognized the earning signs hidden in the receding sea. On Monday morning we woke up to the news of mild tremors and nobody expected the sea to surge and cause havoc hours later.
Initially, we got to hear about the number of hamlets completely washed out without a single surviving member and of people loosing most of their family members and their belongings too. Today, there were brighter stories – an entire village saved because a voluntary worker who had worked in the village earlier was in Singapore that fateful day and had called to warn the villagers on hearing the warning posted in Singapore; another hamlet was saved because a new stream was found in the vicinity and the entire village was out there at the stream; yet another village was saved because according to their folklore, the receding sea would always return with force; a young girl had saved the lives of a number of people by recognizing the warning in the receding sea. Unfortunately, such instances are few and far between. For the majority of the people, it had been as though the sea had pulled off a nasty surprise and they hadn’t found enough time to move away to higher ground. There are so many pictures these days, of people standing on the shore watching the receding tide only to find, moments later, a wall of water coming at them.
Why such a large-scale destruction? What is its significance in the larger scheme of life? How would these people cope with it – especially the fisher folk who will have to go back to the sea?

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Posted in Moments in life | No Comments »