Google Makes It Easier to Search for ‘Me’
Try it out. Go to Google and search for “me.” If you’re logged in to Gmail or any other Google service, you’ll see a small link with your name on it — probably at the very bottom of the page.
Inside is an invitation to fill out your Google Profile. Tuesday, the company set up a new system to encourage users to add information about themselves to their public profiles.
The big question: Doesn’t Google know enough about me already?
Yes, probably. But the updated Profiles give you the opportunity to define what’s most important about you, and ultimately, how you’re represented in Google searches. You can add links to the other places you hang out online, like Twitter, Flickr, last.fm or Picasa. When somebody searches for your name, the information you plug in to your profile will help determine which bits of your online life are exposed first. It should also improve Google as a tool for people search overall.
[NB: Check out Ryan Singel’s take on this development over at Wired’s Epicenter blog. He raises some important points about privacy and the role of volunteered “person data” in Google’s advertising model.]
As we mentioned previously, Google Profiles still aren’t using the rel=”me” microformat. So, there’s little chance the new, beefed up profile is going to usurp any canonical URL you’ve already established on your own by manually adding rel=”me” links to your main website and your various social networking profiles.
Later, if and when Google does add a way for you to identify which sites you want to favor as representing “you” in a search, it’s likely the company will give you the option of using whatever site you want — yours, theirs, Facebook.
Then again, Google does write the rules about how it weighs semantic web data within its searches. So if the company begins to do anything untoward (like ignoring rel=”me” entirely) be a good netizen and delete your profile, which you can do at any time with one click.
Meanwhile, users without their own canonical URL are now able to use their Google Profile as their online identity hub. They won’t have to rely on Facebook or LinkedIn or MySpace to decide the best way to represent them online.
See Also:
