Categories: Technology

Google launches Person Finder in Turkey following 7.2 magnitude earthquake

The search for survivors continues

As rescuers continue to search for survivors following a 7.2 magnitude earthquake that hit Turkey’s eastern Van region yesterday, Google has launched Person Finder there to aid the search for survivors.

Person Finder allows individuals to create records for missing persons following natural disasters, or check the status of persons already on the database in the hope that they have been found alive. Any individual or organisation can update the database as they please.

Person Finder is currently tracking 2,500 reports of missing persons in Turkey following the earthquake. At this early stage some 265 people have been confirmed dead and over 1,140 injured. The death toll is expected to rise.

Google engineers first built Person Finder in January 2010 in response to the Haiti earthquake. Since then, the service has been deployed in Christchurch following the earthquake there in September 2010, and to Japan in March 2011 following the disaster created by the earthquake and tsunami.

Person Finder has to date witnessed 669,200 missing persons records in all four recent natural disasters.

Albizu Garcia

Albizu Garcia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gain -- a marketing technology company that automates the social media and content publishing workflow for agencies and social media managers, their clients and anyone working in teams.

Recent Posts

How the launch of Prezent Vivo promises to change the communication landscape in life sciences permanently 

According to research from McKinsey, nearly a quarter of life sciences organizations had already deployed…

6 hours ago

International think tank Horasis announces dates for its Asia Meeting

Horasis, the international think thank founded by Frank-Jürgen Richter, has announced that its Asia Meeting…

2 days ago

A new era of AI-native education is on the horizon 

While the use of AI in the classroom is always a hotly debated topic, the…

2 days ago

Unauthorized access to Anthropic’s Mythos model raises AI security concerns

Anthropic built a moat around its most powerful AI model yet. When tested, the defenses…

4 days ago

UN, Gates 50-in-5 campaign to award Digital Public Infrastructure leaders at General Assembly

The 50-in-5 Awards are a made-up spectacle to celebrate globalist lapdogs corralling all of society…

7 days ago

Why AI Agents Still Forget—Even With 1 Million Tokens

I spent weeks debugging an agent that kept “forgetting” contexts mid-task. The agent had access…

7 days ago