Search & Identity

Published on April 22nd, 2009 by Jeremy Chatfield

Google can now show personal information in search results, in the USA. The Google Profiles feature doesn’t appear to be fully enabled elsewhere in the world, possibly because it appears to be close-coupled to the “knol” identity verification process, which is restricted to the US for the moment.

As Google Profiles rolls out, it will allow Google to map not just who you are and your business relationships, but your relationships to links and other known people. I believe that this is partially a response to the understanding that searching for people’s names is a large and identifiable fraction of search, but also a sideways step to better understand what constitutes a good web site – and hence a way of ranking based on trust relationships.

By looking at my long-established Google Account, Google Profiles can reveal my business relationship (Merjis, the website and this blog), and my claimed relationship to a LinkedIn profile and the AdWordsHelpExperts site, and my identity as established by posting in the AdWords Help Forum and the links embedded there. I suspect that this is a further step in finding yet another way to avoid the end game for organic search results based on the citation model that is currently a huge fraction of Google’s weighting for sites and pages in search engine results… as I described two years ago in “Search Engines, Game Theory and Intrinsically Corruptible Systems”

From outside the US, the whole process is enormously frustrating. Pages describing how to achieve various tasks dead-end with references to links that don’t exist, for example. I expect that as Google learns how to move from businesses and profiles they do trust, to the international networks, that we’ll start to see the classic US-centric approach to a new product introduction be globally deployed. I’m not holding my breath though. I suspect that infrastructure implied by the knol validation process will take significant time to roll out worldwide.