As an IT professional I have been wondering about the following the last few days. We all have seen tomnod publishing DigitalGlobe maps where users can search for the plane. Wouldn't it be possible for someone smarter than me to come up with an algorithm to scan all the satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe to eliminate big parts of the ocean in the search operation. Water has a characteristic pattern / color and I'm sure an algorithm could be developed to search for patterns out of the ordinary (floating debris). Then these hits could be checked by specialists or even through crowdsourcing.
As an "IT Professional" you should know better ! Exactly how long do you think its going to take someone (or rather, as you well know, a number of someones... known as developers !) to (a) come up with a viable algorithm (b) code it (c) test and debug it ........ seriously man ! Its a non-starter of a hairbrained idea to think someone would expend so much resource !
The best you can hope for in that area is that, seeing as they are in the business of analysing satellite images for people trying to hide stuff, the intelligence agencies already have such an algorithm already in-use and that their masters may permit them to use it for this purpose to see what they can come up with (obviously findings would never be publicly released for obvious reasons, but would be passed in some obfuscated form to the nations taking part in the SAR). But I suspect satellite resources in that part of the world may be busy elsewhere... and they'd need a lot of fresh imagery becasue of the vast search area of seas + some landmass.
As for "crowdsourcing" don't make me laugh. Tomnod is no more than marketing
PR excercise for its owners. Have you seen the sort of nonsense the "crowdsourcing" community have been highlighting on the images ? People with no SAR and no satellite imagery analysis experience are not going to come up with anything of remote use.