Google Person Finder is written in Python and hosted on Google App Engine. Its database and application programming interface are based on the People Finder Interchange Format (PFIF) developed in 2005 for the Katrina PeopleFinder Project.
As with previous response efforts to the September 11 attacks 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 silos. Using PFIF, Google Person Finder aggregated the data from many of these sites, including registries run by CNN and by the New York Times.
Three weeks after the earthquake, Ramaswami and other engineers visited Haiti to learn more about crisis response and asked company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to authorize a permanent Google Crisis Response team.
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 TÅhoku earthquake and tsunami, Google also set up a Picasa 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.
The system was tracking 202,400 names as of March 15, 2011 and more than 600,000 as of April 4, 2011.
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 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.
As with previous response efforts to the September 11 attacks 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 silos. Using PFIF, Google Person Finder aggregated the data from many of these sites, including registries run by CNN and by the New York Times.
Three weeks after the earthquake, Ramaswami and other engineers visited Haiti to learn more about crisis response and asked company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to authorize a permanent Google Crisis Response team.
 Earthquake Shake Maps |  Google Earth/USGS/Earthscope |  Source of original map: Google |  Taiwan Earthquake and Google |  This map uses the Google Earth |
 Ushahidi Haiti Earthquake Map |  from today\x26#39;s earthquake\x26#39;s |  This Google Map shows the |  From Google a map of the |  Map from Real-time Earthquakes |
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 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.
 Earthquake map since March 11 |  Google Earth \x26amp; Google Maps |  survivors; Google Earth: |  Earthquake Maps |  This 2011 earthquakes map, |
 Earthquake Maps |  this earthquake Google Map |  Earthquake Maps |  Earthquake Maps and Data |  Fifi Knott, Dave Knott |
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