DENVER - As the mystery of what happened to the 239 people on board Malaysia flight 370 deepens, a Colorado satellite imaging company is launching an effort to crowdsource the search, asking the public for help analyzing high-resolution images for any sign of the missing airliner. 
 
 Longmont, Colo.-based DigitalGlobe trained cameras from its five orbiting satellites Saturday on the Gulf of Thailand region where Malaysia flight 370 was last heard from, said Luke Barrington, senior manager of Geospatial Big Data for DigitalGlobe. 
 
 The images being gathered will be made available for free to the public on a website called Tomnod. Anyone can click on the link and begin searching the images, tagging anything that looks suspicious. Each pixel on a computer screen represents half a meter on the ocean's surface, Barrington told ABC News. 
 
 "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," Barrington said. 
 
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 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. "Is it really an aircraft wing that's been chopped in half or is this some other debris floating on the ocean? We may not be 100 percent sure, but if this is where I had to go pick a location to go looking for needles in this big haystack, this is where I'd start." 
 
 READ: What We Know Now About Missing Plane 
 
 The company runs a fee-based First Look Event Service that can compare before-and-after images for clients. In the past month, the company activated the service to observe wildfires in Australia, violence in Ukraine and the aftermath of ice storms in Atlanta, Ga. 
 
 In November, the company launched a similar crowdsourcing campaign after Typhoon Haiyan devastated Southeast Asia. The company says users placed more than 400,000 tags, identifying 38,000 damaged buildings and 101,000 damaged homes. ||||| Residents look at ships anchored Saturday on Phu Quoc island in southern Vietnam, where the plane was presumed lost. ( Le Quang Nhat, AFP/Getty Images ) 
 
 DigitalGlobe is enlisting the crowd to scan and tag images of more than 1,200 square miles of ocean for any visible evidence that could help locate the Malaysia Airlines 777 aircraft that went missing this weekend. 
 
 The Longmont-based earth-imagery company deployed its FirstLook service on Sunday, directing two of its five satellites to snap photos of the area in the Gulf of Thailand, where investigators suspected the plane may have crashed, and then activated its crowdsourcing platform, Tomnod, on Monday afternoon. 
 
 Flight MH370, with 239 people on board, lost communication while on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. The missing plane continued to perplex investigators from around the globe three days later. 
 
 "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," said Luke Barrington, DigitalGlobe's senior manager of geospatial big data. 
 
 As each new theory led to a new dead end, the company recalibrated its action plan based on the Malaysian government's new area of focus, north and east of oil slicks reported soon after the plane went missing. 
 
 DigitalGlobe activates FirstLook — used by emergency-response agencies in natural disasters, manmade crises and human interest scenarios — about twice a week, while Tomnod is used more selectively and for different reasons, Barrington said. 
 
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 "We try to use the crowd wisely and not tire them out," he said. "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 Monday 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." 
 
 DigitalGlobe is not the only earth-imagery company capable of delivering high-resolution images, but is arguably the U.S. industry leader. 
 
 "There are an awful lot of assets up in orbit," said Marco Caceres, senior space analyst at The Teal Group. "There's dozens of earth observation satellites and all of them are very, very capable. If they are taking images, then there's no lack of imagery. And if you haven't been able to spot something by now, then I don't know. It has been three days." 
 
 Kristen Leigh Painter: 303-954-1638, kpainter@denverpost.com or twitter.com/kristenpainter ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
– Malaysian authorities seem to have generated nothing but confusion and ill will in the hunt for Flight MH370. Now a Colorado company offers a way for people to do more than vent frustration—they can help scan satellite images, reports the Denver Post. DigitalGlobe wants people to go to its crowdsourcing platform to look at and tag images of the ocean that look promising. An algorithm will then examine results and highlight any areas generating an unusual number of tags, explains ABC News. “We’ll say, ‘Here are our top 10 suspicious or interesting locations,’” says a company official. “Is it really an aircraft wing that’s been chopped in half or is this some other debris floating on the ocean? We may not be 100% sure, but if this is where I had to go pick a location to go looking for needles in this big haystack, this is where I’d start." Of course, the satellite images are based on authorities' best guesses on where the plane might be, and those seem to be changing daily.