Imagine you've been uprooted suddenly by violence or a natural disaster - in the chaos of fleeing for safety, there's a chance you'll be separated from someone you love. For refugees who don't know the whereabouts of friends and family, tracking down people widely dispersed across countries and even continents is a very difficult business.

A new, free internet search engine proposes a refreshingly simple solution to the problem of reuniting families torn apart as they are forced from their homes by conflict or a disaster.

Tapping into social networking technologies, Refugees United aims to help the millions of refugees and people displaced inside their countries each year. The site uses the same principles as websites like Friends Reunited and Facebook to allow people to search and connect with others they know.

As long as those affected have access to the internet, they can search for relatives and friends using a special database, and enter their own details so others can recognise them. Users can search by country, county, last-known location or last name, narrowing it down as they go.

The idea for the site sprang from a meeting between two Danish brothers and Mansour, a teenager who had fled Afghanistan for Copenhagen and hadn't heard from his family since they boarded different vehicles in Kabul.

Together they managed to track down Mansour's brother, but he still hasn't been able to find the rest of his family.

Using the power of the internet to make connections between far-flung people and places, Refugees United aims to become the go-to search engine for displaced people around the world.

There are other well-established initiatives that help refugees track down their families, such as the Red Cross Family Tracing and Messaging service.

Where the site set up by Christopher and David Mikkelsen differs is in allowing refugees to find people themselves, rather than seeking help from a third party.

"We didn't want to be the kind of NGO (non-governmental organisation) that is a third party providing help to refugees," David Mikkelsen, told German news site Spiegel Online. "We wanted to give them the opportunity to take control of their situations and help themselves - and give NGOs another tool to help."

The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) estimates that there are over 1.5 million minors who have lost contact with their parents, according to Spiegel Online.

Refugees United has existed in various forms since 2005, but the site was launched in November last year. Volunteers have since translated the platform into 23 different languages, with an initial emphasis on African languages, although Bhutanese is the next to be added.

The success of the project, of course, depends on people knowing about it and feeling safe to use it.

The site carefully guards the identities of its registered users, protecting people who fear persecution or have crossed borders illegally. Rather than containing reams of personal information, profiles list details that only close relatives and friends might be able to recognise - things like childhood nicknames, names of pets and birthmarks.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to the site's success is enabling refugees to access the internet so they can use it.

To overcome this problem, the Refugees United team hopes to encourage major computer companies to donate equipment to refugee camps, and they're working on technology for reaching the site from mobile phones.

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