Vanishing Point consists of a map of the world connected to a database fed by news coming from several international newspapers. The visibility of each country on the map results from the quantity of media coverage the country receives, so those countries that do not make the news disappear progressively.

The newspapers selected are some of the most widely-read from countries that make up the Group of Seven (G7), the seven most industrialized nations in the world.

Content for the news search was provided by the RSS* feeds of the selected newspapers. For each country, a set of country-specific keywords was created; these keywords, totaling more than 1400 words, were subsequently translated from English to the newspapers' native languages (i.e., French, German, and Italian) for a total of about 6000 keywords.

The search engine, done using complex PHP scripts, scans article headlines and article descriptions, when available, and stores the results in a MySQL database.