Dear professionals, Google is coming to the rescue of victims of Hurricane Katrina using Mapping Technology. It is evident that google is every where. In an effort to help displaced hurricane victims and their families, ad hoc communities of Internet users are using mapping technologies from Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) to track storm damage, analyze aerial photos and try to make sense of what little information is available. Three days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf of Mexico, extensive flooding, widespread power outages and general chaos continue to prevent residents from returning home, and limit the amount of useful information emergency workers or members of the media can distribute to the world outside. What little information about individual neighborhoods gets out is spotty, at best, and hard to come by--largely from dramatic, but ill-defined TV news footage. "We're seeing a lot of images from New Orleans that lack context," says Shawn McBride, a phone switch technician from Spokane, Wash., who has been using satellite photos from the Google Earth service to track flooding and analyze damage to neighborhoods. "It's impossible to tell from the outside how things are." But along comes Google. One Web site, www.scipionus.com, is combating the confusion by encouraging users to annotate a Google Map of New Orleans with information about specific locations. Collectively, the community is creating a collaborative map Wikipedia. Anyone with something to add can enter a street address and leave a marker on the map at that location, providing a few lines of text about conditions at that spot. "Never flooded, typical wind damage, passable street 8-31-05," reads one tag. "Trey and April's We are OK ppl," reports another. The site, created by Jonathan Mendez and Greg Stoll, software engineers who work together in Austin, Texas, went up Wednesday afternoon, and already has attracted nearly 300,000 visitors, who've left more than 600 tags. Mendez, who grew up in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner, La., has family who evacuated the area to his home in Texas. "We all were watching the news and scouring the Web for any information we could get," he says. "There were forums set up for people looking for information on particular areas, but they had hundreds of posts with mostly questions and little information, and it was hard to read through it all. I kept thinking, 'I wish there were a map with all this info, so it would be easy to look this up.'" The site runs off of the same technology that has allowed Google users to keep track of everything from potholes to pizza parlors. In June, the company released code that allowed outside developers to use and adapt the Google Maps software. In the months since, Google "mashups" of geographic data have flourished. "My friend Greg had played with it to make a map with markers to particular locations, so I figured if we could get it so that anyone could add those markers straight from the Web, we could get the information on the map quickly," says Mendez. "People have said they've found it very useful." In a separate effort, other Web users have also made use of satellite photographs of the region available through the Google Earth service, a program which allows users to view satellite photos as if they were flying over them, panning, zooming and tilting the image at will. While most of those photos depict the area pre-hurricane, the software allows users to "overlay" other photos and images. So more recent aerial photos--even pictures from news services and solo photographers--can be reshaped and dropped onto a satellite map, illustrating the current conditions. Pleasantville, N.Y.-based editor and blogger Katherine Cramer helped popularize the practice, after she noticed similarities between a Google Earth shot of the south coast of Lake Pontchartrain, and a news photo illustrating a nearly swamped New Orleans neighborhood. "I looked at those and said, 'Somebody needs to be putting these images together and comparing them.'" Cramer posted a few thoughts on her Web site, which was linked to by Boing Boing, a hugely popular blog, and before long, she was getting e-mails and mashed-together images from people around the country. "Suddenly we had an impromptu collaborative process, mostly consisting of people I don't know," says Cramer. Shawn McBride made some of the first post-Katrina images, and posted them online in the Google Earth Current Events Community, a discussion board for users of the system. "Once you have an image that you want superimposed, it's kind of like a puzzle," he says. Photo manipulators look for distinguishing landmarks that appear in both news photos and the Google images--a warehouse with a red roof, for instance--and then stretch and tilt the photo until it lines up with the satellite map. The resulting image is sort of a hybrid overlay that can be directly viewed and manipulated in the Google Earth service, allowing users to see recent images of their neighborhood, inside the context of the entire city. "It's not as good as the original satellite image, but you can get a sense of whether a house is underwater or not," says Cramer. Cramer has posted a series of directions on her site describing how to use Google Earth to check out flood damage in New Orleans. "I wanted to come up with a process for your average frightened person, who can get at the Internet, but is not able to learn new software," she says. "I've had a lot of people say they couldn't find this information until they came to my site." Google Earth images with post-hurricane overlays even appeared on television Thursday, as a number of news networks used the tool to zoom in and out of affected areas to display the damage. Representatives of Google say they encourage this creative use of their mapping technology. "We've been kind of nurturing and growing that for the past two years," says John Hanke, former CEO of Keyhole, a digital mapping company acquired by Google in October of last year, who now serves as general manager of the Keyhole group at Google. On Thursday, Google began releasing new images of the flooded areas, and even posted links to a number of user-supplied image overlays. Hanke says the company will continue to make available new images over the next few days, and that Digital Globe, their satellite provider, is continuing to photograph the area.