How this 25-year-old created a search engine to find verified COVID resources on Twitter

The second wave of COVID-19 can be characterised by a large number of deaths, queues outside crematoriums and graveyards and helpless pleas for resources like beds, oxygen, medicines and food. Several individuals and organisations have stepped forward to contribute to this fight against the virus. While some have volunteered directly, there are others who have amplified resources and connected them to those in need. Then, there are others who have facilitated this by leveraging technology. Among them is Bengaluru-based software developer Umang Galaiya, who created the website covid19-twitter.in, which has now managed to reach and help several lakhs of people get resources through Twitter.  

So, how did Umang develop the website? Over the past few weeks, Twitter has been the platform for posting requirements and leads for resources from across the country. A Twitter user once stated that if only there was a way to get all the verified leads under one platform and sort them on the basis of cities, it would make it easier for the people in need to access them. "I was scrolling through Twitter on the evening of April 18 when I saw this tweet," says Umang. "I recommended using Twitter's advanced search but I realised soon enough that it might be daunting for someone to use it for the first time, especially when they were looking for COVID resources," he adds. Soon, he got to work and wrote some lines of code in HTML and JavaScript to create a prototype of a separate website. "The website essentially helps create the advanced search query in a more simplified format and redirects the user back to Twitter for verified leads," explains Umang. 

Screenshot of the website

All one has to do is go to the website and type in the city name and select the resource they need. They can choose to deselect tweets that 'need' or 'require' those resources and only look at the verified leads to get the resources. "The website was developed over time. I had asked people on my Twitter timeline to post suggestions on how to improve it. The basic version could only sort through the city name and the word 'verified'. As people kept suggesting what to add, I kept adding the resource options like beds, ICU, oxygen, Remdesivir and so on," recalls Umang. While Umang may have managed to help lakhs of people, he didn't take a lot of time to actually build the website. "The first version took me around 10 minutes to create. Till now, I must have spent around two to three hours to make the website what it is today," says the 25-year-old, who hails from Jamnagar in Gujarat.

Umang works as a front-end engineer for a US-based start-up and has been living in Bengaluru since 2017, after graduating from Babaria Institute of Technology in Vadodara. "The website is open-sourced and people can make changes to the code. Some people have made changes to suit their needs but I have worked on around 95 per cent of the code," says Umang, when asked about whether he worked alone. The website has received 20 lakh page views to date and there was a point when it was receiving about two lakh page views every day. "The page views are decreasing significantly nowadays and that's a good sign," says Umang.