Epress.am News from Armenia
Google has rolled out Public Alerts, a system for notifying the public about emergencies that will be integrated into Google Maps, Mashable reports.
The company announced Wednesday that it is integrating feeds from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Weather Service, and the US Geological Survey (USGS) into Google Maps.
Providing a glimpse of how the program will work, Google offered the hypothetical example of a flood in Indiana. If you searched “flood Indiana,” you’d see a Google Maps page offering links to local flood-related businesses. However, if there were a flood warning, Google would state there was a “Flood Warning in Northern Indiana” and offer a “more info” link, which would lead to a page offering more details on the progress of the flood.
Google is also aggregating all its public alerts on www.google.org/publicalerts. The idea, according to Google, is to provide the public with better information to make decisions during a crisis. So far, however, the company doesn’t appear to be integrating dynamic data from its Google+ social network (or other social networks, like Twitter and Facebook), which might yield even more relevant data.