In the search for Steve Fossett a "many eyeballs" method was used. I recall it was partly successful in that several wrecks were found but from other flights. I recall that one of the frustrations of the crowdsource group was that the data they were given was not in the SW area where it was believed his flight path went. Instead the data was only available due W of his departure airfield. Sure enough the wreckage finally turned up SW.
In the AF case I would expect something like the SETI@home project would be a better fit.
Wikip. quote...
On September 7, Google Inc. helped the search for the aviator through its connections to contractors that provide satellite imagery for its Google Earth software. Richard Branson, a British billionaire and friend of Fossett, said he and others were coordinating efforts with Google to see if any of the high-resolution images might include Fossett's aircraft.
On September 8, the first of a series of new high-resolution imagery from DigitalGlobe was made available via the Amazon Mechanical Turk beta website so that users could flag potential areas of interest for searching, in what is known as crowdsourcing. By September 11, up to 50,000 people had joined the effort, scrutinizing more than 300,000 278-foot-square squares of the imagery. Peter Cohen of Amazon believed that by September 11, the entire search area had been covered at least once. Amazon's search effort was shut down the week of October 29, without any measurable success.[58][59] Maj. Cynthia Ryan later commented that the 'crowdsourcing' was more of a hindrance than a help. She said that persons purporting to have seen the aircraft on the Mechanical Turk or have special knowledge clogged her email during critical days of the search, and for even months afterward. Many of the so-called 'sightings' proved to be images of CAP aircraft flying search grids, or simple mistaken artifacts of old images. Additionally, psychics flooded the search base in Minden with predictions of where the aviator could be found. Ryan got the majority of these calls personally, often at her home, in the middle of the night. One man from Canada was particularly persistent with daily calls to Ryan, interfering with her press briefings. Ryan requested her Incident Commander to issue a 'cease and desist' request, backed up by the RCMP if necessary. Ryan noted that all the 'crowdsource' emails, phone calls and mail was taken seriously - which added to the burden by USAF specialists who were brought in specifically to address that task - and that each was reviewed no matter how outrageous they may have seemed at first glance. In retrospect, the 'crowdsource' effort was "not ready for prime time" according to Maj Ryan