Can crowdsourcing help find Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370?

by The Stream Team @ajamstream

A member of the Indonesian Air Force inspects the Indonesian military search operation for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

ATAR/AFP/Getty Images

A satellite imagery company is hoping a crowdsourced online effort will help in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet.

DigitalGlobe's Tomnod platform has uploaded about 1,235 square miles of high-resolution satellite photos from the search area in the Gulf of Thailand in the past five days, asking volunteers to scour the images to search for possible evidence of wreckage or survivors.

View the story "Crowdsourcing the search for Malaysia Flight 370" on StorifyCrowdsourcing the search for Malaysia Flight 37025,000 people assist with scouring satellite photos for evidence of missing flight's whereabouts. Storified by AJAMStream· Wed, Mar 12 2014 14:42:12DailydotThe site allows users to tag objects in the photos as plane wreckage, life rafts, oil slicks and other items of potential interest to authorities. Tomnod user Mike Seberger tagged an image,showing the outline of a plane underwater. #MalaysiaAirlines #MH370 http://t.co/T5TeOciwekM TayyabDigitalGlobe says more than 25,000 people have so far taken part in the search for the plane, and the site has repeatedly crashed from the high volume of traffic. The online search efforts received an enthusiastic response from the social networking site Reddit.

Many Redditors shared their findings from the satellite image search on threads about Flight MH370.

On 8785 - Oil Slicks. Directly east in the middle of tile 1625, and south a bit in 6730, some debrish looking things.A bit north/northeast in the southwest corner of 9108 is an interesting object.iforgotmyname970A little bit south of this between 7653 and 347 appear to be some more oil slicks and a very strange looking object.The_SuqAt least one Redditor expressed skepticism for how reliable a crowdsourced, online effort would be:It's a neat site, and I'm having a look myself, but I'm extremely skeptical that what's left of the plane will look like a plane, that most debris will be visible at this resolution, and that people using this site won't just tag every rock and flotsam and fishing boat or even just the grain from the satellite imagery itself as "debris". Not to mention other planes that are in the sky at the time the satellite shot was snapped.sasazukaDigitalGlobe has asked a team of experts to vet the tagged photos to avoid passing along useless information to Malaysian authorities. A representative of DigitalGlobe says the items most commonly tagged by searchers so far are oil slicks on the surface of the ocean and boats that already involved in searching for Flight MH370. Web users have tried other ways to get involved in the search. Malaysian newspapers received numerous tips from people claiming to have spotted the plane on Google Maps, which prompted Google to issue a statement warning against using their service to search for the missing aircraft.

"Yes, the images may be there, but it is not real time satellite images as the images may have been provided to us several weeks or months ago," Google said in its statement.

Do you think crowdsourcing will make a difference in the search for MH370? Why or why not? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Places: Malaysia

Topics: Airline Industry, Flight MH370

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Can crowdsourcing help find Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370?

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