Google 'person finder' tool deployed to help relatives find loved ones in Nepal

More than 200 names added to person finder app within hours of devastating earthquake

Google launched a “person finder” tool on Saturday to help users find loved ones affected by the earthquake that devastated Nepal.

With communications to the region badly affected by the 7.8 magnitude quake, buildings flattened and more than 750 people dead, it can collate information from emergency responders and allows individuals to post details about relatives missing or found.

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

The tool has become a regular feature of recent disasters, when reliable information is needed rapidly.

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

But it had been under development for years, part of an open-source effort to solve a problem identified during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As more and more people turned to the internet for help in searching for missing persons, developers realised that relatives and aid workers were having to sift through dozens of websites to find information.

People free a man from the rubble of a destroyed building after an earthquake hit Nepal, in Kathmandu, Nepal, 25 April 2015

People free a man from the rubble of a destroyed building

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.

It is part of a suite of applications developed by Google's crisis resource team. Some are built on existing apps – such as overlaying crisis data on Google Maps – while others involve a new platform, such as tools for delivering public alerts.