[2] Originally a research project of the University of California, San Diego in 2010,[3] Tomnod (Mongolian for "big eye")[4] was founded by Shay Har-Noy, Luke Barrington, Nate Ricklin and Albert Yu Min Lin.
[7] Tomnod used online map interfaces that engage many people to each view and tag a small section of a large area on the planet.
[10] Starting in March 2014 Tomnod took images gathered by DigitalGlobe satellites and offered them to the public for viewing and identification in the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
[11] Over 8 million people used the site to look for signs of wreckage, oil spills and other objects of interest.
[8] It was reported that over 650,000 "objects of interest" had been tagged by users on Tomnod and that their maps had been viewed over 98 million times.