I was pretty impressed -- within literally a minute the #1 result (which looked stylized, so "other than usual" results were at play) for "earthquake" had auto-pulled info about the earthquake and a link to the metrological association. That site is #2 right now, after the government agency in charge.

Above the proper search results you have a Google News thingee and instructions for using the "Report If You're OK" / "Ask If Someone In The Affected Area Is OK" phone systems. (These are well intentioned but useless because, inevitably, everyone just calls directly and the phone network goes down. It happens virtually every time. Still, I can't fault the government / phone company / Google for trying this every time.)

I love initiatives like this.

One I was thinking.. why can't Facebook put an 'Alert box' on everyones Facebook feed if they're in that area.

Good point. I find it hard to remember whether Facebook ever participated in an initiative like this one. I also wonder if majority of dedicated FB users would actually care to pay attention.

It would be interesting if all major websites had this sort of alert system. They already know about where you are and as less and less people watch regular broadcast television it isn't always obvious what is going on with regards to weather. Here in the Midwest it would be pretty great to be able to see that there was a tornado warning or something in my area. In this example it could provide specific information for the particular area.

I remember Myspace use to do that.

I can't even see google.com. I'm being redirected to google.de. Though if you set the Interface Language to English the Alert appears as well.

http://www.google.com/ncr (no country redirect) :)

thank you for posting this! been on a trip out of country and kept getting sent to pages which were in languages I couldn't read, this is great.

Is it on their RESULTS page?

Because many people bypass the search splash page.

They are also doing good with http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/

FYI, here is the translated version of the japanese crisis response

http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.g...

It looks like they provide some information at the top of the search results if your search term include the words earthquake or tsunami.

I don't see anything on http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/ about the Japan earthquake. Do you mean they're doing good with that page in general, e.g. with information about the Christchurch earthquake?

It's mostly for post-event support, I'd expect it to be updated today with a list of resources for Japan.

As of about 8:20 PST / 4:20 GMT, the page has been updated to include information about the earthquake in Japan.

Bravo. They may have saved a life.

Good for them, however would be better if it was clickable to more information... But I guess that would be different per country.