At 11:56 on April 22, Baidu announced that its people-finding platform had integrated information from platforms such as Baidu Tieba, Sogou, 360, and Etao for missing persons, and promised to complete the integration of data from Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, and others within the day. Simultaneously, Baidu's nationwide people-finding data was made publicly available, allowing all people-finding platforms to access the information.By this time, it had been less than 52 hours since the Ya'an Lushan earthquake captured national attention, and only a mere 21 hours since Huxiu.com urged all online disaster-related people-finding platforms to open their data and unify formats. At 10 PM that evening, Sogou announced that it had connected data from 12 people-finding platforms, including those of operators like China Unicom and China Mobile in Sichuan, making it the people-finding platform with the most comprehensive data across the entire network.Besides the operators, CCTV also announced on the 22nd that its people-finding column would be interconnected with the people-finding platforms of CCTV.com, Baidu, and 360, broadening the data sources for this highest-success-rate platform.The largest and fastest joint effort ever seen in China's internet history suddenly came together in the face of natural disaster.All of this began with a hastily eaten large hamburger.The race between the people-finding platforms and timeAt 8:02 AM on April 20, 2013, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Lushan County in Ya'an City, Sichuan Province. The news quickly spread through social networks like Weibo. Zhang Difan, a Google engineer in Los Angeles, recalled on Zhihu that he was eating a hamburger at the famous American burger chain FiveGuys when he saw the news. He hurriedly finished the remaining half of his large hamburger, drove recklessly back home amid Los Angeles' notorious 6 PM traffic jam, and after assessing the severity of the disaster, requested that the Google Crisis Response Team launch the Google Person Finder service for the Sichuan earthquake. This was approximately between 9 AM and 10 AM Beijing Time.In Beijing, a grassroots product manager at 360 learned about the earthquake while reading the news on his iPad on the toilet at 9 AM. He immediately thought of the media reports on Google's Person Finder service during the recent Boston Marathon bombing. He quickly went to the company, discussed with several other colleagues, and spontaneously started developing the 360 Person Finder service. Among these earliest 13 individuals, half had come to the company without being notified.A technical director surnamed Du from Sohu arrived at the company at 10 AM and began developing Sohu's people-finding platform based on information sources from Sohu Community and News Live Studio. She wouldn't have imagined then that this was just the start of three consecutive days of overtime work.In Los Angeles, shortly after Zhang Difan sent out the email, several other Chinese colleagues also sent emails to the Crisis Response Team requesting the launch of the people-finding service. Google has a well-established emergency response plan; after determining the number of deaths and trapped individuals, the Crisis Response Team decided to open the people-finding service. However, they couldn't confirm whether the page (Google Person Finder is built on the Google App Engine platform, which cannot be smoothly accessed domestically due to well-known reasons) could be accessed in China. Zhang Difan requested domestic users to help test and translate the feedback messages to responsible colleagues. The news of Google opening the people-finding service for the Sichuan earthquake thus spread on Weibo by 4 PM. Two hours later, Google China officially announced the launch of the people-finding service.Google's Crisis Response Service is an important part of Google.org's philanthropy, under a non-commercial domain. This entire suite of services is much more powerful than a simple people-finding service, relying on Google's existing products, and should include emergency products such as disaster area maps and satellite images based on Google Maps and Google Earth, but these services are temporarily unavailable in China.Google Person Finder, which originated during the Haiti earthquake, played a crucial role in subsequent disaster relief efforts. Typically, after a disaster occurs, the search for missing persons in the disaster area involves multiple-to-one relationships, where direct relatives, close friends, classmates, and other objects of missing persons all have requests to find them. This not only puts immense pressure on the disaster area's communication network but also requires a significant amount of effort to notify each one individually once the missing person is found. If the missing person unfortunately perishes, this information burden shifts to relevant rescue and civil affairs departments.After Google Person Finder goes online, the relatives and friends of missing persons and the missing persons themselves can use the network for asynchronous, remote contact and safety notifications. Rescue and civil affairs departments can also identify and carry out search and rescue operations based on the information. Moreover, using already mature open technology, Google freely distributes the embedded code for the people-finding platform, allowing any website to prominently embed Google's people-finding service. This largely solves the problems of localization and coverage.On the day of the Ya'an Lushan earthquake, apart from Google, domestic companies or products such as Sohu, Baidu, Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, 360, and Etao launched their own internet-based people-finding platforms successively. These showed significant importance in stabilizing the emotions of relatives and friends in various disaster areas and providing clues for frontline search and rescue teams, but they also brought new issues: with so many different people-finding platforms, which one should the information be posted on, and whose feedback should be monitored?The path to unified data for the giantsThis issue does not exist in the United States. After the Haiti earthquake, Google improved and upgraded the long-existing PFIF information format (People Finder Interchange Format personnel lookup exchange format). This format establishes a standardized information list for missing persons, where seekers simply fill out the forms; more importantly, this format is highly friendly to the exchange needs of different platforms, allowing each people-finding service platform to exchange and synchronize information, recording the original registration website. Thus, seekers can achieve one-post, full-network searching, and once the missing person is found or the seeking information becomes outdated, all platforms can synchronously delete the seeking record.However, due to the information isolation between domestic and international entities, China's various people-finding platforms initially did not base themselves on PFIF, with engineers choosing data formats familiar to themselves or commonly used by their companies.On the afternoon of the second day after the earthquake, as disaster information was continuously updated, the information on the major internet people-finding platforms kept increasing, and users occasionally complained about the inconvenience caused by multiple platforms. At 15:40 in the afternoon, based on previous knowledge of Google's people-finding service gained from tracking reports on the Boston explosion, Uncle Miao issued an initiative article on Huxiu titled "A Call for Companies Such as Baidu, Sohu, 360, etc., to Connect Earthquake People-Finding Platform Data!" urging all platforms to unify their data formats to PFIF, share, and eliminate duplicates. This way, it could reduce the repeated labor of seekers posting on individual platforms and provide more uniform personnel data for rescue and civil affairs departments.360's public relations team was the first to see this call and fed it back to the technical team; the people-finding platform operation team had also received some user complaints about the multitude of platforms. After consolidating opinions from all three sides, they reached a preliminary agreement: quickly switch the format to PFIF and make it open to other platforms.Zhou Hongyi, who was in Hong Kong at the time, didn't hesitate much upon hearing the technical team's request and soon instructed the official Weibo account of 360 Search to issue a statement about unifying to the PFIF format. Zhou himself then tweeted at 17:34: "In the face of natural disasters, saving lives and treating injuries comes first. Internet companies should set aside grievances and conflicts, unite, and consolidate resources to serve the public. As the first step, I suggest that companies like 360, Baidu, and Sohu send working groups to work together and strive to achieve data sharing among all people-finding platforms as soon as possible, ensuring the authenticity of the data to the maximum extent possible. I hope this becomes a regularized coordination and communication mechanism for internet companies facing natural disasters."Less than an hour later, Wang Xiaochuan, CEO of Sogou, also expressed his stance: "I don't usually forward posts from Zhou Hongyi, but this time is an exception. Sogou has already connected the people-finding data with Sohu, leveraging the advantages of search and media, accumulating interconnection experience. I also hope Baidu and 360 will join." This statement became a representative declaration of the temporary abandonment of competition and grievances among various internet companies and their joint efforts against the disaster.Wang Xiaochuan revealed to Uncle Miao that Sogou had already done a people-finding project before, but few knew about it when Weibo wasn't yet popular. After Sogou's people-finding service went online, it had already connected data from Sohu, Sina Weibo, and Tencent Weibo. After deciding to open up and connect on a larger scale, Sogou formed a team led by General Manager Ru Liyun of the Search Department, including external liaison, technology, marketing, and other personnel, achieving the PFIF transformation of people-finding data by the morning of the 22nd. On the Sohu portal side, after a telephone exchange between Wang Xiaochuan and Chief Editor Liu Chun, the standardization of people-finding data was also achieved.That evening, Wang Gaofei, Vice President of Sina, also expressed his stance, requiring Sina Weibo's open platform to quickly open up the Weibo people-finding data; Baidu and Etao's official Weibo accounts indicated that engineers were striving to standardize the data. The largest collaborative operation ever seen across the entire Chinese internet was finally completed.