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The earthquake in Haiti, which notched a terrible 7.0 magnitude, had drastic consequences for the country and affected lives everywhere.
Google, always socially conscious, took several steps to provide relief, as eWEEK noted here.
The No. 1 search engine is promoting help relief on its homepage, the most valuable piece of real estate online:
The link takes you here:
Concerned citizens can submit donations to UNICEF or CARE through Google Checkout, or donate directly to several other disaster relief funds.
According to a post on Google’s official blog, the company also donated $1 million to organizations in Haiti that are “rescuing those still trapped and providing clean water, food, medical care, shelter and support to those affected.”
In conjunction with GeoEye, the Google Earth team did its part to keep the world in the loop on the tragedy with satellite imagery.
Users can download the KML here; see it through an embeddable KML overlay gadget; and open the file in Google Maps here.
For example, here are before and after pictures of the Presidential Palace and Port-au-Prince, which have been sadly leveled by the quake:
The search engine also made its Map Maker data for Haiti available to the United Nations for the earthquake relief efforts.
Map Maker is the company’s application that lets users take satellite imagery and build maps from them in true crowdsourcing fashion. Google said it hopes the crowds “with on-the-ground knowledge … [will] help update the map of Haiti with disaster response data.”