Search & Rescue Volunteers of a New Kind

Search and rescue volunteers generally get their hands dirty. Before service they might learn how to rig and operate a raising and lowering system, perform field orienteering, and learn to triage. Then, they're on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Until recently…

Steve Fossett, the millionaire aviator and adventurer, disappeared in his airplane on September 3, 2007 somewhere over northern Nevada. Twenty planes and 60 search and rescue volunteers were in flight last week, looking for Mr. Fossett. They weren't alone.

As the New York Times reported on Sunday, 25 year-old Andy Chantrill played an active role in the search for Mr. Fossett from his home in Castle Donington, England, where he used the internet to pour over satellite photographs of the area where Mr. Fossett vanished.

How does it work? Amazon and Google collaborated to manage a "distributed search" on the Internet, where the latest satellite imagery is examined by a pool of 20,000 search and rescuer volunteers. Every image, representing 278 square feet, is examined by 10 volunteers over the course of an hour. After close examination, volunteers choose one of two responses:

• Yes, this image contains foreign objects that should be looked at more closely.
• No, this image contains nothing of interest (or shows no usable data).

So far, this new technology has not been rewarding. In the case of James Gray, a Microsoft computer scientist who disappeared in his sail boat, neither traditional nor web-based searches led to his whereabouts. As the air search for Mr. Fossett was cut back yesterday, hope remains that Mechanical Turk will work.

Click here to read more about the new world of search and rescue.
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