KUALA LUMPUR, March 11 — Two pairs of eyes are better than one. In this case, a crowdsourcing campaign could seek the help of thousands of people to locate the missing Malaysian airliner and the 239 people on board, from the comfort of their homes.

As 80 aircraft and ships from 10 nations scour for evidence of the missing jet in the South China Sea and along the Straits of Malacca, a Colorado-based satellite imaging company, DigitalGlobe has launched an effort to crowdsource the search, asking the public for help to scan and tag high-resolution images for any sign of the missing airliner on tomnod.com.

Senior manager of Geospatial Big Data for DigitalGlobe, Luke Barrington told America’s ABC News that each pixel on a computer screen represents half a meter on the ocean’s surface.

“For people who aren’t able to drive a boat through the Pacific Ocean to get to the Malaysian peninsula, or who can’t fly airplanes to look there, this is a way that they can contribute and try to help out,” he said.

On Sunday, two of its five satellites collected approximately 3,200 square kilometres of imagery of the Gulf of Thailand region that can now be analysed, according to the company’s web site.

Yesterday, DigitalGlobe revised its plan to collect imagery further north in the Gulf of Thailand after authorities announced a wider search area.

A massive search and rescue effort has entered its fourth day since the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 aircraft fell off the radar at 1.30am on March 8, en route to Beijing. It had taken off less than an hour before.

According to the DigitalGlobe’s web site, Tomnod, which was acquired last year, has been involved in the response and recovery efforts for numerous natural and man-made disasters.

According to ABC News, the company activated the service to observe wildfires in Australia, violence in Ukraine and the aftermath of ice storms in Georgia, US, all in the past month.

It also reported that in November, the company launched a similar crowdsourcing campaign after Typhoon Haiyan devastated parts of Southeast Asia. The company says users placed more than 400,000 tags, identifying 38,000 damaged buildings and 101,000 damaged homes.

DigitalGlobe will use a computer algorithm to determine whether users start tagging certain regions more than others.

In-house satellite imaging experts will follow up on leads, Barrington said.

“We’ll say, ‘Here are our top ten suspicious or interesting locations,’” Barrington said.

“If there is something to see on the surface (of the water), we will see it. But the question is if we are looking in the right area,” Barrington, DigitalGlobe’s senior manager of geospatial big data told the Denver Post.

“The story here is much more about the search than it is about the response. This whole feeling of not knowing, the lack of information or ability to do anything, we have seen time and again, is why people want to get involved.”

Within the first hour yesterday afternoon, the Tomnod map had 60,000 page views with more than a thousand tags. Ten minutes later, that was up to nearly 2,000.

Barrington said that the crowd actually directed the company on this particular crisis, asking for them to deploy Tomnod.

“The people who come to Tomnod are very motivated to solve problems,” Barrington said. “I would say we will have up to 10,000 contributors on this one.”

At the time of publishing, the map on Tomnod could not load, probably due to high traffic as it was working fine earlier in the day.