With relief efforts underway, many displaced Haitians and their friends and families around the world are extremely concerned about the safety and whereabouts of loved ones. In retort to the Haitian earthquake, a team of Googlers worked with the U.S. Department of State to create an online People Finder gadget so that people can propose information about missing persons and to search the database.
You'll find this gadget on our Haiti earthquake response website and on the State Department website. In order to stop the proliferation of multiple missing persons databases (a big problem during Hurricane Katrina), Google has made the People Finder gadget standards-based and easily embeddable on any website (see here for instructions). The gadget is at present available in English, French and Creole.
Google is also helping families in the U.S. stay connected with their loved ones in Haiti by offering free calls to Haiti for the next two weeks via Google Voice. If you don't have a Google Voice account already, apply for an invitation at www.google.com/voice.
For anyone interested in viewing updated imagery in Google Earth, Google has now included GeoEye's shots in the Historical Imagery feature. Now you can see the imagery without downloading the KML file and can use the time slider to easily compare the stark before-and-after images, such as those below. To help relief organizations, GeoEye has made professional-quality files of the recent satellite imagery of Haiti downloadable via our earthquake response website. The imagery in this format will be important to GIS organizations and aid workers.
Google has also made Haiti Map Maker data publicly accessible for download for non-commercial use and attribution. Data can be used by relief workers to do things such as make offline maps, merge data sets and run analysis, all of which we hope will help with their efforts on the ground.
News and user footage continues to roll into YouTube. Oxfam and the American Red Cross are even responding to contributions by uploading videos that show viewers accurately where their donations are making a difference.
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