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 U.S. 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.
One of the greatest things about having a claimID page is that you can easily provide people searching for you with a real picture of your identity. With claimID you can claim your blog, your website and news articles that mention your name into a central place. If someone is searching for you, they previously might not have found all of those important pages. With claimID, you can put your best face forward and let people see the identity you wish to present.
While it is amusing to see Google compete into a space we helped pioneer a few years back, I won’t flatter myself by claiming that Google stole our model. In fact, my read on Google Profiles is that the service is much less about connecting externally facing links, and all about the connection of Google’s disparate properties.
Over the past ten years, Google has notoriously kept its head in the sand regarding social computing. All the while, they built or acquired properties that were inherently social (Blogger, YouTube, Jaiku, Dodgeball, Feedburner, JotSpot). Google missed the big picture on many of these properties for lack of scale – and the lack of a clearly monetizable product line when compared to the Adsense juggernaut.
Today, many of us have a Google account, many more have left comments or posts on Google properties, and virtually all have left a wealth of deeply personal information in Google search queries. Behind the scenes, Google has long had this information interconnected, but this wasn’t apparent to users. Using Google properties was all about skipping between islands requiring different logins for purely perfunctory reasons.
Google profiles are an attempt to fix this problem, under the guise of web identity management. Yes, Google gives you a place to claim external links, but Google profiles are actually a central place for the management and access to Google properties. It is about bootstrapping a standard, unary identity on the multiple identities Google has forced us to create. But this bootstrapping is awkward, as the primary use case reveals: Want to use your full name in your Google Profile, but perhaps just go by your initials on your Gmail account?
The name on your profile is associated with the name on your Google Account: changing one will also change the other. You can set up one public profile with your full name.
Danny Sullivan walks through another interesting artifact – your Gmail address is your only “vanity” profile URL option.
It turns out that vanity URL must be the same as your Gmail address. In other words, whatever your address is on Gmail, that’s going to be your address in your vanity URL. If my Gmail address began emperorzorg, then I’d have a vanity URL that looked like this:
google.com/profiles/emperorzorg
Oh joy. If you have a Gmail account, and you claim your vanity URL, then you expose you email address to the world. Google explicitly warns you that this can happen, but it’s still pretty sucky. Why not operate the way that Google’s YouTube does or Yahoo’s Flickr, where you can have a username that is different than your email address?
I do believe this is the definition of ham-fisted.
The hard reality with Google is that a forced consolidation that isn’t sensitive to the contextual differences between their services will introduce a whole new set of problems – boundary management, context collapse. I might have thought joesixpack@gmail.com was a funny email address in 2008, but do I want it forever associated with my Google profile? Of course there are ways around this – delete your Gmail, Google Docs, and everything else associated with your Google account and start over – but at what cost? Google will continue to face these problems as it consolidates your YouTube viewing history, and eventually parts of your search history/notebooks on the profile. The good news is that Google can address all of these issues by thinking functionally and contextually about privacy. The Google profile is becoming a necessity, but they must be careful about the “reveal” inherent when connecting their properties.
But what of this other issue, people search? Indeed, people search is a big issue. A big issue to a number of companies, a big issue to research organizations, and a big issue to all of us being searched. Google’s introduction of profiles doesn’t really solve any of these big issues, because the big issues are really, really hard. Google’s profile is an essentially unverified set of links, equal to any other page on the net except for the fact it gets some preferential treatment in search. This is useful to the edge cases (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) but less so for the Jim Smith’s of the world. Whats more, a lot of other companies, ClaimID included, have made good progress in this area. If people want to own their search engine results, there’s a lot they can do about it. What does 4 results at the bottom of a Google page really add?
I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about and researching models of people search on the web. A first model is the refinder – someone looking to reconnect with a past friend. Facebook and other social networks are particularly good at this, because network betweenness is a very useful variable for predicting a connection. A second model is an action-based searcher – someone looking for actionable information about someone they know (say, a phone number or email address). Sure, Google is useful here, but action-based searchers turn to every resource possible when trying to complete this search. A third model is the investigator – someone looking to know more about a potential employee, date, friend, etc. These searchers will also utilize all resources at hand, but will attempt to look past “crafted” pages and profiles, preferring sites that provide back-stage information.
So where does the Google profile fit with these models of search? For the savvier of us, the profile is just another datapoint. For some others, the Google brand may trump some other sites for some tasks, but not all. But is it a game changer, and does it work towards solving the hard problems of name search? Not really. But then again, profiles aren’t really about name search, they’re about connecting Google properties. Here’s to hoping Google spends a little more time thinking through the privacy implications of this very big company strategy.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
Just to complain further as a Brit does this mean the upstart American David Brakes who so far I have kept further down the page of Google search results will be able to “jump the queue” and go straight to the top? At least until Google opens this programme to other nations?
I think you’re right – though, they’ll get to jump the queue to the bottom of the page (so I’m not sure how much it matters). What is interesting is Google’s concept of relevance – the profile that has the most information is determined to be the most “relevant.” So when you’re able to play, you’ll know how to fix it!