Mumbai: Search engine giant Google has launched an application "Person Finder" to offer information on missing people in flood-affected areas in the country, including Uttarakhand.
Google Person Finder is a web application that allows individuals to post and search for the status of relatives or friends affected by a disaster, Google said in blogpost.
The tool is available in both Hindi and English. As per a Reuters report, thousands of people are stranded in parts of northern India and at least 150 are feared dead in flood-hit Uttarakhand.
The recent floods at Uttrakhand has devastated many districts in the state of Uttrakhand. While thousands are being evacuated, like most natural disasters there are many people who are missing. Google has a person finder page put up dedicated to finding information on missing people because of the Uttarakhand floods.
Google person finder is not compiling official records of missing persons but it allows anyone to put up information of people who are missing. There is an option to update this information on a person you might have information about too. Currently at the time of writing this post, there seems to be over 3000 records being tracked.
The data is open and not verified by Google but crowd-sourcing probably helps out getting a lot more information out there. Also as the administration fights the floods and updates their official lists but not in a centralized manner, Google’s person finder could be a boon.
http://google.org/personfinder/2013-uttrakhand-floods
No comments:
Post a Comment