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Google's interactive hub explains Syrian refugee crisis

"Searching for Syria" answers five of the most common search queries about the war that has devastated the country.

Katie Collins Senior European Correspondent
Katie a UK-based news reporter and features writer. Officially, she is CNET's European correspondent, covering tech policy and Big Tech in the EU and UK. Unofficially, she serves as CNET's Taylor Swift correspondent. You can also find her writing about tech for good, ethics and human rights, the climate crisis, robots, travel and digital culture. She was once described a "living synth" by London's Evening Standard for having a microchip injected into her hand.
Katie Collins
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Google.org has invested $20 million in grants to support refugees since 2015.

Google/UNHCR

Googling "Syria"? The UN refugee agency has teamed up with Google to create a website that answers your questions.

Launched on Monday, the interactive website answers the five most common search queries about Syria and its refugee crisis. In 2016, people searched for information about the crisis tens of millions of times, according to Google.

"Searching for Syria" tackles questions such as "What is going on in Syria?" and "What was Syria like before the war?" The answers combine data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) with Google Maps, satellite imagery, videos, photography and stories from refugees to show both the scale of the war and the human suffering.

As fake news continues to plague the internet, Google said the "Searching for Syria" project is designed to help inform people who are looking for a trustworthy source of information.

"Sharing these trends, based on UNHCR's verified data, will ensure that people searching to better understand one of the most terrible events of the last six years will be able to do just that," Google said in a blog post.

Life, disrupted: In Europe, millions of refugees are still searching for a safe place to settle. Tech should be part of the solution. But is it?