Today is Thursday, March 13th — in other words, it’s last Thursday — and right now, the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is an utter mess.

By the time you read this, I fervently hope, for the sake of the families and friends of the passengers, that the mystery of the missing jetliner, a Boeing 777-220 with 239 souls on board, has been put to rest. It’s almost inconceivable that in this day and age, a jetliner can go missing for nearly a week — much less two — but the fact remains: early in the morning of March 8th, Flight 370 abruptly stopped communicating with air traffic control and hasn’t been heard from since.

At the moment, all sorts of explanations — some reasonable, others hare-brained — are being advanced for the disappearance of the aircraft; Malaysian officials are saying that no theory is off the table.

But the most pressing matter is to find the wreckage, if the plane indeed went down, which seems almost inevitable at this point.

There’s a global fascination with the search, which touches on some of the deepest anxieties of the modern traveler: the safety of flying over open water; the possibility that airliners, once again, have become vulnerable to suicidal extremists; the primal fear of plunging from the sky, at night, into the sea — or worse, into oblivion.

I’m as troubled by the disappearance of Flight 370 as the next guy, so this morning, I decided to do something about it. I turned off the buzzing halogen lamp in my office; drew the blind; steered my Web browser to www.tomnod.com; and started scouring satellite images of the Gulf of Thailand for airplane debris, oil slicks, inflatable slides, and emergency rescue boats.

Tomnod, which means “Big Eye” in Mongolian, is a service of DigitalGlobe, a publicly traded company that sells “remote sensing products” to the government and private sector. Those nifty satellite images you see on Google Maps were likely beamed to earth from one of DigitalGlobe’s satellites, which are capable of astonishing resolution. In cases of natural disaster like Typhoon Haiyan, which ravaged the Philippines last year, or an international search and rescue, as in the disappearance of Flight 370, DigitalGlobe has released huge swaths of imagery to the general public and asked ordinary people for their help.

I’m certainly no expert in spotting downed aircraft. In the first forty-five minutes on Tomnod, as I clicked on an endless series of squares, loading seemingly identical black and white photographs of open water, complete with whitecaps and bits of puffy raincloud, I wondered if I even knew what I was looking at. Military analysts train for years to recognize the telltale signs of human activity. Maybe those whitecaps weren’t whitecaps at all!

Each square represented an area about 1700 feet by 1200 feet. A counter on the side of the screen kept track of how many squares I’d looked at, and a little navigation graphic showed me my progress. My field of vision — a single square — was represented in yellow. All the squares I’d already clicked on were black; the ones I hadn’t yet seen were bright blue. After clicking around for what seemed like a very long time, the number of bright blue squares was overwhelming.

And Tomnod had only assigned me a tiny corner of the overall search!

As I stared at the screen, trying to remember to blink so my eyes wouldn’t get too dry, I cycled through many of the emotions I imagine the professionals feel: an uncomfortable awareness that I didn’t really know what I was looking for; excitement at the prospect of actually spotting the airplane; boredom; but most of all, awe at the sheer scale of the problem.

Forty-five minutes in, as I clicked on the 745th square, something caught my eye: a bullet-shaped object with a thin projection from each side. There was no mistaking that it was manmade, even if it was a little blurry. According to the scale marker at the bottom of the screen, the object was about 80 feet long — too short for the fuselage of 777, but just about right if most of the plane were submerged. The things poking out of the sides were symmetrical. It was possible that they were inflated slides.

Was it the missing plane? Perhaps. But it was much more likely that I’d simply spotted a fishing boat with its booms extended. Even so, I wrote down the number of the square and dutifully reported it to Tomnod headquarters, where an expert will presumably be culling through “finds” like mine.

There’s nothing new about “crowdsourcing” a scientific project. The first Audubon Christmas bird count, which relies on the observations of skilled amateurs, was organized more than a century ago. But more and more, scientists are relying on the so-called “Wisdom of Crowds,” as author James Surowieki described the phenomenon in his 2005 book.

In fact, in this era of seemingly invincible computer algorithms, it’s somewhat surprising that the search for Flight 370 can’t be automated.

Here’s the thing: computers are excellent at drilling through mountains of data — but only if they know what they’re looking for.

When no one really knows what happened, as in the case of Flight 370, it’s hard to beat a few million pairs of good, old-fashioned human eyeballs.