Google Me
Friday, April 24th, 2009 April 24th, 2009
Ever had t As the push toward individual search engine optimisation (SEO) intensifies, so does the penchant to “Google” someone. To give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name, we’ve begun to show Google profile results at the bottom of US name-query search pages. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles. We’ve also added links so it’s easy to search for the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn. (Source) Of course, for the new service to actually work for people, they need to sign up for an account with Google and the more information a person shares, the more likely they are to show up on the first page when a person searches for their name. To sign up for the service, Google tells users to simply search for “me.” Google’s Joe Kraus acknowledged that the company has seen an increased demand in the search engine optimisation of individual’s names in search engine results and thinks this is the beginning of the solution. Of course, it is. How? Simply put, Google Profiles looks to establish singular online identities of users, even linking their various online accounts (say blogs, Google reader, Youtube etc) and offer a singular source for information. This also opens up a plethora of choices for third-party developers to build interesting things on top of these profiles.
But there’s another side to this argument too. Do we really want everything available in one-click access on Google? This includes our place of residence (seen on google maps), the blogs we wrote bitching about someone on Blogger, or interests and hobbies (as registered on various social sites) or even pictures & phone numbers (again from some website online). Of course, you can choose to give none and keep a black profile too. So, what’s the bright idea that Google is selling here? It’s like you can now control what information should flow to make your profile look good (in case it comes up during search) but this will mean that you give Google a little more access to your life’s data. So I guess, then it’s not so good as there’s already more than necessary information out there. |