Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Wednesday Search Challenge (Jan 26, 2011): How many tons of fish in Vladivostok?

This is another relatively simple search task... IF you know how to approach the problem.  


This is a variant of a question that I was asked by a friend doing research into the Russian economy, and I've extracted one sub-question for your consideration:  


     How much fish (by weight) went through the 
     Russian seaport of Vladivostok in 2010? 


Simple to ask.  And relatively simple to answer.  


Can you figure it out?  


If so, send in a comment (and tell us the method you used)!  


Search on! 



3 comments:

  1. Answer - In 2010 the port handled through the piers: bulk cargo - 540.3 thousand tons of fish products.

    I started with [Vladivostok seaport fish] after wading through those results backed up to something broader [seaports data].

    Then tried [russian seaports data] and then [russian seaports data fish] and finally [russian seaports data +fish]. I still wasn't finding it so went over to the Show More Tools option and selected "in the past year."

    That got me to a Bloomberg Businessweek article on OJSC Vladivostok Sea Fishing Port http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=41951595
    In the article they provide the web site http://www.fishport.ru/ that is in Russian. So I headed over to Google Translate and plugged it in and from there I clicked on news to give me this page http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fishport.ru%2F&act=url

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  2. I found another result: 1 761 900 tons

    I used the google and limited the results to last month only. The searchphrase was: [fish seaport vladivostok year report]

    http://rtdr.org/news/maritime/vladivostok_fishing_seaport_cargo_handling_up_15_times_in_2010.html

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  3. I used a similar method to Fred, but utilized one of my favorite tools in Google's Left-Hand Panel: Translate Foreign Pages.

    I was pretty sure this would be in government data, but don't know the structure of government data in Russia. So, starting with a "fishing" search (ha-ha) I looked for [vladivostok fish port]. Translate foreign pages took my search, translated it into Russian, and brought me back the Russian-language results translated back into Englis for my convenience.

    The first return was this:

    http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&langpair=ru|en&u=http://vestiregion.ru/2011/01/24/za-2010-god-cherez-primorskie-porty-proshlo-bolee-16-milliona-tonn-ryby/

    This source gives 1.5 million tons (so convert for US measure) as the answer. The article says that last year the Russian government started tracking fish caught by Russian vessels, including what port they entered.

    Nest step I would usually take: find the government report itself.

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