Significant Earthquake Database (via NOAA) contains information on destructive earthquakes from 2150 B.C. to the present…”

Earthquake Intensity Database Search, 1638-1985 (via NOAA) is a collection of damage and felt reports for over 23,000 U.S. earthquakes. The digital database contains information regarding epicentral coordinates, magnitudes, focal depths, names and coordinates of reporting cities (or localities), reported intensities, and the distance from city (or locality) to epicenter. Earthquakes listed in the file date from 1638 to 1985.”

You can also search and find recent quakes by a general location around the world. For example:
earthquakes Japan or
earthquakes Alaska

Also, Ask offers (its been available for about a year) a near real time earthquake map of all detected quakes around the world.

KPIX in San Francisco provides this video of a seismograph running during today’s quake. They also offer a real time feed of the several seismographs in the Bay Area.

Interesting to note that, while I’m not a fan of Personalized Search, here is an example of where it might be useful.

I’ve never done a search in my life for soccer or anything related to soccer teams or even California sports in general, so it might have been a good time to employ some PW and skip the team news. Maybe Google News and oneboxes are an appropriate place for PW rather than regular SERPs.

And I guess Earthquakes is a brand name now, so that presents another challenge to be tackled.

http://www.boardtracker.com/search/?search=earthquakes&order=0

Technorati also has a few posts indexed now and to be fair, so does google blogsearch.

Personally I like to subscribe to search terms like “breaking news” which often gives me a heads up about things like this (although so far not in this case) – of course one could also subscribe to “earthquake, volcano, hurricane, ‘google down’” etc. to get the hot news on any major disaster (almost) as it happens.. ;)