Google Profile Search

You can now search Google profiles to find people who entered some information about themselves in their public pages. Google shows a thumbnail and a snippet from the profile, but you can't restrict the results to a certain location or to people who worked for a certain company.


To make your profile more findable, Google recommends to "add information about yourself on your profile so people can find you when they search by keywords associated with your profile. For example, include details such as the name of your hometown, your job title, where you work or go to school". In addition to this specialized search engine, profiles can be indexed by any search engine and Google makes this easier.

Yahoo has recently updated user profiles to make them more social. "Yahoo! Profiles is a centralized control panel that lets you manage your identity, activities, interests, and connections across Yahoo! — and eventually the entire Web."

The next challenge is creating an universal profile attached to a digital identity that gathers and filters all your disparate activities from the web. The move towards OpenID, OAuth, the integration of OpenSocial in Google's properties, the launch of FriendConnect are pieces from the same puzzle.

{ via Google Blogoscoped }