Blogs, Social Networks and Search Engines

31 Mar 2007

Ignore the fact that this post is about me searching for myself on Google.  Everybody does it.

I’ve noticed a slight change in some of the search (Google & Yahoo) results.

The top results are now starting to include public profiles for various online services.  I’m talking about Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Feedburner, etc. 

Also included are personal blogs and depending on the search engine, particular postings.

There’s a lot of information held in each of these services, so it’s nice to see at least an entry point to each showing up.  I suppose with a bit of grease, you could incorporate these results with more detailed information using each services API. 

Intentional or not, I think it’s a step in the right direction.  Ideally it would be as automated as possible, so something like Wink may not be all that appropriate (it’s interesting tho).  173,814,621 people indexed and only a LinkedIn entry for me.  At least it’s indexing LinkedIn and MySpace. 

Most of us go out of our way to prevent our email addresses from being indexed, but it would be nice if I could search (effectively) by email address (Yahoo did at least returned results for email addresses).  Data privacy concerns aside, Google has a lot of information already and could easily do a mapping between email address and name.  Or even for searches being performed by me, use the information from my address book as additional context.

If nothing else, it makes doing a quick background check on candidates that much easier.  <:]