KUALA LUMPUR, March 15 — Some simply want to help find missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, while others are playing sleuth in the “unprecedented mystery” of its disappearance.

But whatever their motivations, there are now over 2.3 million Internet users signed up with Tomnod.com, a crowdsourcing website run by DigitalGlobe Inc, in the hunt for the Beijing-bound flight that went missing a week ago with 239 people onboard.

“I guess like everyone else I think the whole thing is a mystery, given that no one seems to have any idea where the plane is or what happened,” Mandy Paine, an Australian accountant, told The Guardian about her participation.

Paine said she spent 16 hours scouring satellite images for the plane so far, finding the task “addictive” even if it has sometimes given her a headache.

Another user, Anja Meloinen from Belgium, told the UK newspaper that this was not the first time she has helped on Tomnod.com.

“I’ve helped to map Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, searched for a missing plane in Arkansas, and a lost boat at sea in New Zealand,” Meloinen said.

“I started looking for the plane as soon as I received Tomnod’s email alert on 10 March and spent quite some hours on it already.”

While there is no questioning the quantity of the effort, there are doubts over the quality of the online search.

Previous such efforts in locating the aircraft of billionaire adventurer Steve Fosset yielded no results despite the thousands poring over satellite imagery online.

But what most discredited the so-called “crowdsourced” searches were the online detectives hunting down the perpetrators in the Boston marathon bombing last year, which had then devolved into a “witch hunt”.

Still, those looking for MH370 on Tomnod.com are not discouraged by the lack of success then and — as it stands — now.

“It feels good to feel you can help a bit when a disaster strikes, from your comfortable chair at home, no matter where you live on this globe. It’s much better than not be able to do anything to help,” Meloinen said.

Paine also felt that those on Tomnod were more likely to find traces of the plane than the authorities.

“To be honest I’m very distrustful of the way the official investigation is being handled and all the conflicting information. I have a feeling if the plane is in the ocean there is a good chance it will be found by us,” she said.

As the mystery of flight MH370 continues to deepen and the search area widen, Paine’s prediction may turn out to be true. A search area that began as some 100 nautical miles grew to over 400,000 square kilometres, before new information suggested this may now be millions more.

At that rate, the chances that rescuers will be able find traces of the plane become exponentially smaller.

 

“I won’t stop searching as long as new images are provided and the plane isn’t found,” Meloinen said.