Google and Tsunami

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)