Google Person Finder is an open source

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serv ...

that provides a registry and message board for survivors, family, and loved ones affected by a natural disaster to post and search for information about each other's status and whereabouts. It was created by volunteer

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

engineers in response to the

2010 Haiti earthquake A catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake struck Haiti at 16:53 local time (21:53 UTC) on Tuesday, 12 January 2010. The epicenter was near the town of Léogâne, Ouest department, approximately west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's c ...

. Google Person Finder is written in

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

and hosted on

Google App Engine Google App Engine (often referred to as GAE or simply App Engine) is a cloud computing platform as a service for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple server ...

. Its database and

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

are based on the People Finder Interchange Format (PFIF) developed in 2005 for the Katrina PeopleFinder Project.

History

Immediately after the

a group of 20 volunteer engineers developed Person Finder. The software was based on Ka-Ping Yee's work on th
September 11 survivor registry
and on the PFIF data standard. Google also worked with the

United States Department of State The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an United States federal executive departments, executive department of the Federal government of the United States, U.S. federal government responsible for the country's fore ...

to create an embeddable version, which was embedded on the State Department's website and other websites. Google Person Finder launched in English, French, and Haitian Creole on January 15, less than three days after the earthquake. As with previous response efforts to the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commer ...

and Hurricane Katrina, many different organizations created sites with lists of missing persons, leading to a concern that information would be scattered across incompatible

information silo An information silo, or a group of such silos, is an insular management system in which one information system or subsystem is incapable of reciprocal operation with others that are, or should be, related. Thus information is not adequately shared ...

s. Using PFIF, Google Person Finder aggregated the data from many of these sites, including registries run by

CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by ...

, the '' Miami Herald'', and ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

''. Google's work on the Haiti earthquake led to the formation of the

Google Crisis Response Google Crisis Response is a team within Google.org that "seeks to make critical information more accessible around natural disasters and humanitarian crises". The team has responded in the past to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, 2010 Pakistan floods, 2 ...

team, which has launched Google Person Finder again for several subsequent disasters, in many different languages and with a variety of data exchange partners.

Deployment

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. For the

2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami The occurred at 14:46 JST (05:46 UTC) on 11 March. The magnitude 9.0–9.1 (M) undersea megathrust earthquake had an epicenter in the Pacific Ocean, east of the Oshika Peninsula of the Tōhoku region, and lasted approximately six mi ...

, Google also set up a

Picasa Picasa was a cross-platform image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, integrated with a now defunct photo-sharing website, originally created by a company named Lifescape (which at that time was incubated by ...

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. Noteworthy deployments of Google Person Finder include: *January 2010:

(complete within 72 hours) *February 2010:

2010 Chile earthquake The 2010 Chile earthquake and tsunami ( es, Terremoto del 27F) occurred off the coast of central Chile on Saturday, 27 February at 03:34 local time (06:34 UTC), having a magnitude of 8.8 on the moment magnitude scale, with intense shaking l ...

(live within one day) *July 2010:

2010 Pakistan floods The floods in Pakistan began in late July 2010, resulting from heavy monsoon rains in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, Punjab and, Balochistan regions of Pakistan, which affected the Indus River basin. Approximately one-fifth of Pakistan's tot ...

(considered a failure because people in the affected area did not have Internet access) *February 2011: February

2011 Christchurch earthquake A major earthquake occurred in Christchurch on Tuesday 22 February 2011 at 12:51 p.m. local time (23:51 UTC, 21 February). The () earthquake struck the entire of the Canterbury region in the South Island, centred south-east ...

(live within 3 hours) *March 2011:

(live within 1 hour) *October 2011: 2011 Van earthquake (live within 1 hour) *April 2013: 2013 Boston Marathon bombing *April 2013:

2013 Ya'an earthquake The Lushan earthquake or Ya'an earthquake (, ''Yak-ngai Sayom'') occurred at 08:02 Beijing Time (00:02 UTC) on April 20, 2013. The epicenter was located in Lushan County, Ya'an, Sichuan, about from Chengdu along the Longmenshan Fault in the ...

(live within one day) *October 2013: 2013

Cyclone Phailin Extremely Severe Cyclonic Storm Phailin (; th, ไพลิน, translit=Phịlin, lit=sapphire) was the most intense tropical cyclone to make landfall in India since the 1999 Odisha cyclone until Cyclone Amphan hit West Bengal in May 2020. The sy ...

*November 2013:

Typhoon Haiyan Typhoon Haiyan, known in the Philippines as Super Typhoon Yolanda, was one of the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded. On making landfall, Haiyan devastated portions of Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines. It is one of the ...

(Yolanda) *April 2015:

April 2015 Nepal earthquake The April 2015 Nepal earthquake (also known as the Gorkha earthquake) killed 8,964 people and injured 21,952 more. It occurred at on Saturday, 25 April 2015, with a magnitude of 7.8 Mw or 8.1 Ms and a maximum Mercalli Intensity of X (''Extreme ...

. The system was tracking 202,400 names as of March 15, 2011 and more than 600,000 as of April 4, 2011.

Details

Sites that adopt PFIF may interconnect with each other by exporting and transmitting data or allowing their site to be scraped; sites such as blogs and narrative accounts that are not compatible are reviewed by volunteers who key missing person information in PFIF format. The

software widget A software widget is a relatively simple and easy-to-use software application or component made for one or more different software platforms. A desk accessory or applet is an example of a simple, stand-alone user interface, in contrast with a m ...

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.

References

External links

*
Open source project site
Google Person Finder
haiticrisis.appspot.com
Google Person Finder,

{{Authority control Disaster preparedness Web applications Person Finder Internet properties established in 2010 2010 Haiti earthquake Software using the Apache license Emergency management software

History

Deployment

Details

See also

References

External links