Dozens of bulletin boards have been created to find persons missing since Hurricane Katrina, and two companies have built specialized search engines to seek out the data they contain to help searchers find friends and loved ones, including pets, reports the New York Times. Lycos, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, searches at least 20 bulletin boards and missing persons websites every four hours (lycos.com/Katrina), and Yahoo retrieves information every hour from 15 large sites and other, smaller ones (news.yahoo.com/katrinahelp).

Engineers for Lycos said they started the site August 31 after noticing the proliferation of places for posting such information. Both search engines comb the Family News Network of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Nola .com (the website affiliated with the New Orleans Times-Picayune), Craigslist and the Katrina Safe List of the Cable News Network. Yahoo also scours its bulletin boards.