Tomnod was being used by singer Courtney Love in an attempt to find missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 370, but nothing came of it.
Users on Tomnod already said that what she found was a boat.
“I’m no expert but up close this does look like a plane and an oil slick … prayers go out to the families,” she wrote on Twitter, which was retweeted hundreds of times this week.
She also posted her findings on Facebook, and she marked the maps with notes. “Teally? look closer? check it out @DR24 #MH370 and its like a mile away Pulau Perak, where they “last” tracked it ,” she said.
Tomnod is a crowdsourcing website that uses satellite images taken by DigitalGlobe. It asked the public to look over the images to find the plane, which disappeared March 8.
Love, the widow of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, was the subject or ire after she posted the images.
According to the Upstart Business Journal, Tomnod started as a research project by four engineering graduates at the University of San Diego. It was later acquired by DigitalGlobe in 2013.
The project was created amid a National Geographic project that was set on searching for the tomb of Ghengis Khan. About 10,000 people looked at satellite imagery in the Valley of the Khans in Mongolia.
“Tomnod” means “Big Eye” in Mongolian.
Tomnod co-founder and ex-CEO Shay Har-Noy said volunteers are responsible for more than 140 million map views, and around 2.2 million people have participated in searching for the plane.
“We are lucky to be in a position where we can help,” Har-Noy wrote on Twitter.
According to recent reports, two objects were seen in the remote southern Indian Ocean and are being investigated.
A freighter used searchlights early Friday to scan rough seas in one of the remotest places on Earth after satellite images detected possible pieces from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in the southern Indian Ocean.
In what officials called the “best lead” of the nearly two-week-old aviation mystery, a satellite detected two large objects floating about 1,000 miles off the southwestern coast of Australia and halfway to the desolate islands of the Antarctic.
The development raised new hope of finding the vanished jet and sent another emotional jolt to the families of the 239 people aboard.
Australian authorities said in a statement early Friday that the search had turned up nothing so far. Efforts were resuming with four military aircraft planning to scour more than 13,000 square miles (35,000 square kilometers) of ocean.
One of the objects on the satellite image was 24 meters (almost 80 feet) long and the other was 5 meters (15 feet). There could be other objects in the area, a four-hour flight from Australia, said John Young, manager of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s emergency response division.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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