Google's Person Finder is open source[1] and uses the People Finder Interchange Format[2], which was designed after Katrina specifically so that disaster relief organizations can quickly share this data so that data sources stay in sync and new ones can be quickly revved up (if traffic overwhelms some or, I don't know, a company decides to no longer host one).
Federation of this data is the most important aspect of it, because people use many different sources for news and information, and should not have to search for every possible database of missing persons to find the information they need. For example, after the 2010 Haitian Earthquake, CNN, the New York Times, the Miami Herald, and the Google Person Finder all shared data[3] so that if any one (or several) went down, all that information was still available from other sources.
In any case, I don't know if you were trying to score free internet points or just being snarky, but it's generally a good idea to do basic research before repeating non sequiturs.
Federation of this data is the most important aspect of it, because people use many different sources for news and information, and should not have to search for every possible database of missing persons to find the information they need. For example, after the 2010 Haitian Earthquake, CNN, the New York Times, the Miami Herald, and the Google Person Finder all shared data[3] so that if any one (or several) went down, all that information was still available from other sources.
In any case, I don't know if you were trying to score free internet points or just being snarky, but it's generally a good idea to do basic research before repeating non sequiturs.
[1] https://code.google.com/p/googlepersonfinder/
[2] http://zesty.ca/pfif/1.4/
[3] http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/100245/google...