One of the issues raised by emergency response team members is not knowing where to go for relevant information about current crises. There are a limited number of sites that everybody goes to – bbc, alertnet and reliefweb being the main ones – but beyond that, it gets a bit blurry.
So Google recently released their new customised search engine service, so I thought, Hey – why not try to build a humanitarian search engine that targets the sites that present the most useful information from a humanitarian perspective? It’s not exactly going to change the world, but luckily I didn’t put much effort into it.
So here it is, a work in progress.
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Interesting idea – but does it work? A little test with “ECB” – the overrused acronym for the Emergency Capacity Building Project – gives the following results:
Humanitarian Google: 3rd, behind cricket and bankers (!)
Your everyday Google: nowhere
I’d say you were on to something.
Yeah, it works up to a point… but not to the extent that I’d like. I guess Google will be working on the algorithms behind it for a while. I wonder how useful it would actually be, and how we can get some of the emergency response teams to give it a try?