150,000 of Google Profiles

Google wants to index all the existing public profiles of Google users, so it created an index of sitemaps and placed the address at google.com/robots.txt. Since the Sitemap protocol has been adopted by all major search engines, creating a sitemap is the easiest way to inform search engines about a large number of web pages from your site that don't have backlinks.

The sitemaps include about 150,000 Google profiles and this seems to be the number of people who took the time to create a profile in Google Maps, Google Reader and the other services that integrated the unified profiles. Since Google didn't promote this feature, the number of people that create a profile will increase once it becomes more visible.

As Jérôme Flipo noticed, Gmail started to link to the profiles pages of your contacts, probably only for Google Talk friends.


To create or edit a profile, visit this page and enter as much or as little as you want. "A Google profile is simply how you present yourself on Google products to other Google users. With a Google profile, you can easily share your web content on one central location. You can include, for example, links to your blog, online photos, and other profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and more," explains Google.

Something You Can't Find Using Google

Google Profiles, the public pages that include information about Google users, continue to add new questions. Some of the recent additions: "where I grew up", "where I live now", "places I've lived", "current company", "companies I've worked for", "current school", "schools I've attended", "my superpower".

There's even a metaphorical field "something I can't find using Google". What would you write if you were to answer that question in your Google profile?


Note: for now, only 118 profiles are indexed by Google.

Google Suggests Sites for Your Profile

Google started to use the Social Graph API to suggest links that can be added to your public Google Profile. If you add links to sites that are connected to other sites using FOAF or the XFN microformat, Google makes it easy to import all the links. For example, if you have an account at FriendFeed, add a link to your FriendFeed page to import the sites you shared: videos uploaded at YouTube, Google Reader shared items, del.ico.us bookmarks etc.


Google's unified profiles are slowly added to all Google services that allow user-generated content. "A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you're all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you'd like," explains Google. For now, the profiles are displayed next to the list of shared items from Google Reader, in the Google Books library and next to the custom maps, reviews and edits from Google Maps.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }