WebProNews

Both Lycos and Yahoo! have set up a way for the families and friends of the victims of Hurricane Katrina to search Internet bulletin boards and other sites with information about the status of missing loved ones.

As reported in the New York Times, Waltham, Mass.-based Lycos is updating its index every four hours from over 20 different bulletin boards and missing persons Web sites. Yahoo!'s spiders are crawling every hour from at least 15 such sites.

"This is not just about finding the missing or deceased. "It's about families trying to figure out where their families went," the Times quotes Steve Quince, director of engineering for Lycos.

The two search engines crawl the Family News Network of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Nola.com, Craigslist and CNN's Katrina Safe List.

Jason L. Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.