With Google Person Finder, the search engine giant is doing its bit towards helping people locate their family members who are missing in Uttarakhand, the North western state in India which was struck by floods earlier this week. It is available in Hindi, apart from English in the country.
According to the official website of the initiative, it helps people from across the world to locate loved ones and family members in areas affected by natural or humanitarian disasters. The internet-based service requires users to punch in the names of people they are looking for, while organizations and other individuals should add in status, name, physical description, address, a message and other such details of victims who are stranded.
As soon as someone enters a name, the tool matches the data and comes up with results and other details that it has. But for the website to work like this, it is very important that organizations take up the task of entering information about everyone they encounter into the database. It should be noted that whatever is added to it can be accessed by all those who log in to the service in question.
In order to make the most of this tool, government and NGOs should embed Google Person Finder to their respective websites or redirect people to the official page. Apart from downloading the details directly from the search engine’s archive, these organizations can make use of the API to synchronize the information with their own database. It will be forwarded in an XML-based format called People Finder Interchange Format (PFIF).
In order to help Google Person Finder with this initiative, people can upload information to its archives and help those who are searching for their friends and family members stranded in Uttarakhand. Governmental as well as non-profit societies can format data available to them in PFIF and forward it to the tech giant’s database to help those who need it.