Google has introduced a new feature to give you a bit more control over what comes up when someone searches for your name – sort of.
Now, when you search for a name on Google, you’ll get a list of the Google Profiles that users have setup under that name at the bottom of search results. If you haven’t yet setup a Google Profile, you’ll now be provided with the option to do so when you Google “me”.
This is going to be a welcome addition for lots of people, especially those who aren’t necessarily happy with what links Google has for them on the first page of results. It also solves the problem of sharing a name with someone that happens to be a popular search term. For Google though, it could be a big boon to Google Profiles, the service that is powering this whole thing.
Google Profiles themselves are rather basic, allowing you to enter some details about yourself, link to your social networking profiles, upload a photo, and share contact details with specific groups of people that you setup. They’re also available at a custom URL – google.com/profiles/yourname. If you want your profile to show up in search results, you’ll need to opt-in via the Google Profiles site - it’s not automatically included.
Now that they are integrated in Google ego searches, you can imagine that people are going to be paying a lot more attention to what’s in their Google Profile and keeping it updated with more frequency. As such, Google might have just unlocked an incredibly important piece of their social networking strategy. There might not be a social network (in the traditional sense) built around Google Profiles just yet, but the groundwork has just been laid in a very big way.
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Via Mashable
Personal comment:
Oui, bien sûr, nous avons tous fait des recherches pour le nom de telle ou telle personne, pour son propre nom, etc.
Google offre maintenant une possibilité de customiser partiellement les résultats des recherches qui concernent sa propre identité/personne --US only! pour l'instant-- (et collecte au passage quelques informations utiles puisqu'il faut posséder un compte Google...)