Google finder for quake missing

A member of the disaster response
force checks a satellite phone
before being airlifted to Nepal

from a camp in Ahmedabad. (AFP)

Rob Crilly, TT, New York, April 25: Google launched a "Person Finder" tool today to help users find loved ones affected by the earthquake that devastated Nepal. With communications badly affected by the 7.9 magnitude quake, it can collate information from emergency responders and allows individuals to post details about relatives missing or found. The result is a searchable, online database.

Within hours of the disaster hitting Kathmandu and its surrounding area just before noon, 200 names had been uploaded.

Google engineers first launched Person Finder in response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which killed more than 100,000 people.

Since then it has popped up at a string of major emergencies, everything from the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.# It has been deployed twice before in India: for an earthquake in Jammu and Kashmir last year and flooding and mudslides in Uttarakhand a year earlier.

While individual users can either upload information about a missing person or search by name, it also offers emergency workers and crisis response organisations the opportunity to add their own databases - by using what programmers refer to as an API key, essentially a means of ensuring that only accredited groups can send information to the online database.