Searching for things like CZU Lightning fires or the more general California wildfires will send people to a results page with a three-part module. One section shows the boundaries of the fire, another offers safety tips, and the third lists resources for evacuation information.
Its not an entirely new project, since Google piloted a version of this for the state of California last year while it gauged the utility of such a tool. And there are other crowdsourced maps available for the specific purpose of tracking wildfires and other major weather events or natural disasters, like this Wildfire Early Notification Map.
But Google, as one of the worlds most powerful collectors of data, believes it can offer a better service by creating these overlays that will update in near-real time.
Search results for fire emergencies now feature the latest news stories and a map of the affected area that's updated once an hour.
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Original article