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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Or let Google do it. Google can scale much faster than the Red Cross can outsource it.

Until Google decides to close it a few years from now in order to focus on what matters.

There is no need to run a person finder for longer than the duration of the disaster.

We've had wars that run for decades, a timespan in which it's definitely possible for a company to lose interest (or even cease to operate altogether). Thankfully this doesn't seem to be an issue as long as the company running it uses the open data format as pointed out by magicalist.

Google's Person Finder is open source[1] and uses the People Finder Interchange Format[2], which was designed after Katrina specifically so that disaster relief organizations can quickly share this data so that data sources stay in sync and new ones can be quickly revved up (if traffic overwhelms some or, I don't know, a company decides to no longer host one).

Federation of this data is the most important aspect of it, because people use many different sources for news and information, and should not have to search for every possible database of missing persons to find the information they need. For example, after the 2010 Haitian Earthquake, CNN, the New York Times, the Miami Herald, and the Google Person Finder all shared data[3] so that if any one (or several) went down, all that information was still available from other sources.

In any case, I don't know if you were trying to score free internet points or just being snarky, but it's generally a good idea to do basic research before repeating non sequiturs.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/googlepersonfinder/

[2] http://zesty.ca/pfif/1.4/

[3] http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/100245/google...

Are you seriously taking advantage of this tragedy to bash Google for shutting down Reader? Wow, and I thought the Reader drama couldn't get any lower.

Reader isn't the first project Google (or Google.org) lost interest in or shut down. For me the big eye-opener was their "Project 10 to the 100": they got 150,000 entries for where to focus philanthropic funds, waited a few years with no updates and then donated a total of $10 million to 5 organizations.

Kudos for donating money, but they announced a big contest, got tons of input and made this seem like a big focus, and then when that toy wasn't fun to play with anymore they ignored it for a few years until somebody remembered they had money to give away.

Because having ads for making funerals less expensive is exactly what I want to see when I'm searching for my loved ones that disappeared during an earthquake.

I'd rather not-for-profits continue disaster relief, like they have been, and the for-profits actively choosing to donate to them.

There are no ads on that page.

Very true; and I trust that Google would have a heart to not do that. At least, I hope they wouldn't. My point was that if a for-profit company enters this space, they need a way to monetize their efforts, and it's a field ripe for exploitation. It's better if a non-profit does this, since their heart is more likely to be in the right place.

From Wikipedia: "Google.org is the charitable arm of Internet search engine company Google.

The organization has committed over $100 million in investments and grants as of May 2010."

As much as I like to rag on Google for their lip-service to "don't be evil", this isn't such a case. I don't think Google.org has a [direct] profit motive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google.org

The link is to google.org, google's not-for-profit arm.

Is there actually a difference between google.com and google.org? I sincerely figured that Google, wanting to not be confused or have their domain offended (whitehouse.com anyone? You couldn't go to that link back in the 90's).

Edit: reading shrikant's response elsewhere, it appears that there is quite a difference. That is very cool, then :)

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