Google Helping To Find Australians In Japan

Google has launched a service that is helping Australian find family members and loved ones, following the Japanese earthquake.As hundreds of Australians remain unaccounted for Google has launched a version of its Person Finder service which could help authorities locate missing Australiams.

The website acts as a directory and message board so people can look for lost loved ones or post a note saying they are safe.

Earlier today the Federal Goverment said that they were trying to locate thousands of Australians known to be living or staying in Japan, including 164 registered in the regions at the frontline of the devastation.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it had received more than 4400 calls from families trying to find details of relatives and friends unable to be contacted in the area.

It is designed to be embedded on websites and social network pages to reach as wide an audience as possible.

The system has proved useful after other disasters that have stopped people getting in direct touch.

Victim log
In its first few hours, the Japan quake Person Finder had logged more than 4,000 records.

The extent of the damage caused by the Japanese earthquake is not yet known but its magnitude and the widespread devastation wrought by the subsequent tsunami is likely to see tens of thousands displaced.

The Person Finder was developed to solve a problem common in the aftermath of many catastrophes when many different agencies are on the ground giving aid and gathering information about victims.

Google’s Person finder was also used in the aftermath of the 2011 New Zealand earthquake.

Before the advent of tools such as Person Finder it was much harder to compare the information gathered by separate agencies and help to re-unite families and friends.

Underlying the site is a common format for describing people who are lost or who want to announce they are safe by whatever means they can.

In the wake of disasters, many volunteers in other countries often scrape sites for this formatted information and add it to the People Finder database. Others take information from blogs, texts and tweets and convert it to the format so it can be put in the database.

The system was first used following the Haiti earthquake that struck in January 2010. That first tool was based around work done in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans.