Indeed, this approach paves the way for using real-time search engine queries to efficiently map earthquake felt area in the regions with a relatively large population of search engine users.Įarthquake is a major natural geological disaster, inflicting huge economic losses and casualties worldwide every year. By fitting the epicenters of earthquakes occurred in mainland China from 2014 to 2018 with well-designed machine learning models, we can efficiently learn the realistic weight of confidence for each search query and sketch the felt areas and intensity distributions for most of the earthquakes. In our approach, each query is regarded as a “crowd sensor” with a certain weight of confidence to proactively report the shaking location and extent. Specifically, we provide a very efficient, robust and machine-learning-assisted method for mapping the user-reported ground shaking distribution through the large-scale analysis of real-time search queries from a dominant search engine in China. To this end, we introduce a new direction to improve the information acquisition through monitoring the real-time information-seeking behaviors in the search engine queries, which are submitted by tens of millions of users after earthquakes.

While considerable efforts have been made in this direction, it still remains a realistic challenge for gathering macro-seismic data in a timely, accurate and cost-effective manner. This estimate provides critical guidance for government emergency response teams to conduct orderly rescue and recovery operations in the damaged areas. Rather than employ editors and researchers to curate links for specific queries, Google began building algorithms that scored the content it was indexing against specific criteria.Immediately after a destructive earthquake, the real-time seismological community has a major focus on rapidly estimating the felt area and the extent of ground shaking. Google’s original business was creating algorithms to help people sort quickly through the rapidly growing amount of content being put online. The company has successfully launched a wide range of other products and services, including YouTube, Google Maps, Google Apps, and Google Cloud.Google monetized its search engine capabilities through Google Adwords, an online platform that enables the company to earn revenue through pay-per-click advertising.Google's initial business model focused on building a powerful search engine based on algorithms that help people sort through vast amounts of content to deliver accurate results for each search query.A key component of Google's success is the company's ability to launch a prototype or beta version of a product and continue to make improvements with each iteration.

Rapid search engine