 Google Person Finder embeddable widget (January 19, 2010) | |
Type of site | Humanitarian aid |
|---|---|
| Available in | Multilingual (47) |
| Owner | Google, Inc. |
| Revenue | none |
| URL | google |
| Launched | January 15, 2010 |
Google Person Finder is anopen sourceweb application that provides a registry and message board for survivors, family, and loved ones affected by anatural disaster to post and search for information about each other's status and whereabouts. It was created by volunteerGoogle engineers in response to the2010 Haiti earthquake.
Google Person Finder is written inPython and hosted onGoogle App Engine. Its database andAPI are based on thePeople Finder Interchange Format (PFIF) developed in 2005 for theKatrina PeopleFinder Project.[1]
Immediately after the2010 Haiti earthquake a group of 20 volunteer engineers developed Person Finder.[2] The software was based on Ka-Ping Yee's work on theSeptember 11 survivor registry and on thePFIF data standard.[3] Google also worked with theUnited States Department of State to create an embeddable version, which was embedded on the State Department's website and other websites. Google Person Finder launched in English, French, andHaitian Creole on January 15, less than three days after the earthquake.[4]
As with previous response efforts to theSeptember 11 attacks andHurricane Katrina, many different organizations created sites with lists of missing persons, leading to a concern that information would be scattered across incompatibleinformation silos.[5] UsingPFIF, Google Person Finder aggregated the data from many of these sites, including registries run byCNN, theMiami Herald, andThe New York Times.[1][6]
Google's work on the Haiti earthquake led to the formation of theGoogle Crisis Response team,[2] which has launched Google Person Finder again for several subsequent disasters, in many different languages and with a variety of data exchange partners.
Google Person Finder is typically embedded in a multilingual Crisis Response page on Google's site, which also contains various other disaster tools such as satellite photographs, shelter locations, road conditions, and power outage information.[7] For the2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Google also set up aPicasa account to allow people to submit photos of the name lists posted in emergency shelters, to be manually transcribed and entered into Google Person Finder.[2]
Noteworthy deployments of Google Person Finder include:
The system was tracking 202,400 names as of March 15, 2011[13] and more than 600,000 as of April 4, 2011.[14][15]
Sites that adopt PFIF may interconnect with each other by exporting and transmitting data or allowing their site to bescraped; sites such as blogs and narrative accounts that are not compatible are reviewed by volunteers who key missing person information in PFIF format.[1] Thesoftware widget used for directly entering information has two buttons, "I'm looking for someone" and "I have information about someone", and can be embedded directly onto other web pages.[16]
