Amazing Google

I got a call about 10 min ago informing me about police firing in Hyderabad. I quickly scanned all the usual news websites and did not find any information. So I decided to do a Google search to see what results it would return and I was truly amazed at what I got.

What is amazing is

• It had what I was looking for on the first page of the search results
• It was able to report something that was first posted approximately 45 min before I did the search. (Wed Dec 3 03:03 PM). It managed to mine this information from the page knowing that it would be relevant to me.
• It even tells me how long before it indexed the page (7 min before I did the search) to show how recent the information is.

It is amazing how they got all this information on the search result to help me determine which is the most appropriate answer to my query. It is just amazing how Google manages to deliver exactly what someone needs over and over again and I totally buy into the notion that search is the new navigation method. So if you think your sites navigation sucks incorporate Google custom search into your site and I am sure you will give your users the experience that they want.

About Piracy

The recent pirate attacks on a lot of ships off the coast of Somalia in the Gulf of Aden has been in the news. This made me wonder if the pirate attacks are something new or is it something that keeps going on but has just made the headlines because of the volume of attacks. I found this website - ICC Commercial Crime Services that has a Live Privacy Map that lists out all the pirate attacks that have been reported in the recent past. Each map point represents a reported pirate attack and you can click on the map point and read a whole report about the pirate attacks.

In the same website the page Piracy prone areas and Warnings gives details of the areas that are to be avoided and it is interesting to note that all the areas happen to be around South East Asia, Indian subcontinent and the African coast. I am not sure if this is because of the sea routes that are taken or the number of developing/underdeveloped countries in these regions.