Did Web Amateurs Impede Search for Fossett?

For the second time this year, amateurs from around the globe recently gathered online at Amazon's Mechanical Turk project. Their goal: Find the missing plane of Steve Fossett (pictured), the heralded millionaire who presumably crashed in the Nevada wilderness on September 3. Fifty thousand volunteers spent hundreds of thousands of man-hours looking for wreckage by ogling satellite images of areas along Fossett's flight path. And to date no trace of Fossett has been found.

The same thing happened in February, when Jim Gray's sailboat went missing off the coast of California. Gray was never located and is presumed dead. (Wired has a fascinating feature on his disappearance, if you're curious how things ended up.)

In the wake of two failed attempts to harness the power of the teeming masses (a.k.a. crowdsourcing), people are starting to wonder whether it's all actually useful in the end. As one searcher, who spent hours on the Amazon site poring over images in a hunt for downed aircraft, notes in this Wired update on the Fossett case, "Eventually it was disheartening, and I realized I had no idea what I was actually looking for."

Searcher fatigue and ignorance is one thing, but a bigger question is whether the flood of false leads actually impeded professional rescuers in the air. Old crash sites, in-air rescue planes, and good old garbage on the ground were commonly mistaken for Fossett's downed aircraft, leading to a "flood of leads" to the Civil Air Patrol. One of the officers in charge of the search says she now wishes the online search had never been launched at all.

Is this a bad omen for crowdsourcing projects? For now, yes, though Amazon and other experts in this space note that, without failed projects like this, they'll never figure out how to make the system better next time. One idea on the table: Offering searchers two images, one from before the person went missing and one from after, so they can more easily see changes in the terrain that could indicate a recent crash site. But for now, the jury is still out on whether you and I have any place in hunting for missing persons.