With the displacement of about 1/2 or so people, with so many refugee camps and so much chaos after Katrina hit the Gulf coast of the US, one more problem is being looked at.

The headline: Duplication rife in online efforts to reunite evacuees

The article goes on to explain the frustration of people searching for relatives and friends online.

Although the Internet makes it simple for people around the world to help out with disaster relief, all the well-intentioned but largely duplicative people-finding efforts have led to confusion, frustration and wasted time.

“There really needs to be one place where people can go and get information,” said Trisha Denny, a Phoenix resident who has primarily used GulfCoastNews.com to check on loved ones in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. “There’s always the possibility that somebody I knew and cared about has posted somewhere else.”

The Internet may free information from the grips of centralized hands, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, “but at some point it’s terribly useful to have a centralized, responsible, trusted clearinghouse.”

It makes sense in theory, but how realistic is it?
Coders and helpers would have to know there is a centralized data base, which is in itself a near impossible task.
People with computers searching for loved ones would have to be made aware there was a central site and know how to use it.
It would be an industry in itself, volunteer or not, and someone would have to pay for the bandwidth and effort. And what if servers went down because of load or unforseen consequences? It would take extrodinary technicans to design a centralized system that anyone looking could use under great duress.
And it completely fails to factor in the human aspect of tragedy, those that do what they can in the moments given them to help. That is one of the knowns in a serious event. People step up and step in to help.

We’ve seen the difficulties faced with government efforts to assist famlies after natural disasters. Consulate officials deal with the grief and frustration of family and friends almost daily.
For example, information from a consulate is fed back to Foreign Affairs Canada. Family and friends have access to the centralized information by phone, fax and computer.
Finding and reuniting people is at the best of times fraught with administrative difficulties on every level imaginable.

The idea sounds practical and tidy.
But human loss isn’t tidy, isn’t simple and is never centralized.
I’d rather see a coder enter information five times and duplicate their effort than put faith in a centralized one size fits all data base. If I was searching for a loved one, I’d do what I had to do; exhaust all efforts, sit on and refresh any online effort, centralized or not while I branched my search with any kind of communication technology available to me.

Is this an area search engine owners can improve on?