Jim Gray

They then uploaded them to Amazon Mechanical Turk, a platform where users complete small digital tasks.

Within days, roughly 12,000 volunteers from around the world had joined what became known as the Jim Gray Group.

Together, they worked through more than 560,000 individual images, scanning each one for any sign of a red-hulled sailboat.

It was one of the first large-scale applications of crowdsourcing for a search and rescue operation.

And the cruel irony wasn't lost on anyone.

The systems underpinning this effort, the databases, the distributed computing, the large-scale data processing, were technologies Jim Gray had spent his life advancing.

The prevailing theory among marine experts is straightforward and grim.

Gray's boat was a design that's reportedly vulnerable to hull damage, and the waters near the Farallon Islands are full of drifting debris.