Posts tagged Google Profiles
In the Social war between Google and Facebook, might egosurfing prove Google’s secret weapon?
Google and Facebook are battling hard over the Social web. Google’s trying hard to catch-up to Facebook’s lead, tying 25% of all of their staff’s bonuses to the firm’s success in this space. With the launch of the +1 button, they’ve belatedly acknowledged the role that social is set to play in their core business, search. And yet, for +1 to be a success, it needs Google to make it truly social, both to help reliably detect spam and make the most of the data generated. Google needs to finally demonstrate that it can ‘do’ social, something at which it’s so far mostly failed.
But might they have a secret weapon in these social wars?
A Pew Internet study in 2007 found that almost half of all people ‘Egosurfed’: they Googled their own name to see what results appeared. I’d bet that proportion is much higher these days. Whether simple curiosity, or a desire to manage your personal brand online, knowing what appears when you search for yourself is basic internet hygiene.
On a recent Egosurfing trip, I noticed something I’d not seen before: my Google Profile page in the first page of results. And it wasn’t just true for me. Googling for Sevitz, and even my dad showed up profile pages in the first screen of results on searches for their names:
Might Google be boosting the ranking of Profile pages in search results to get egosurfers to visit them and update them? I know that’s what it made me do. That would be a bit, well, evil though, surely? So perhaps that’s a yes then.
This relies on people already having Profile pages, but it’s not hard to imagine a more evil version that prompts you to set up a profile for a name search if that’s you.
Google already has several of the key ingredients for a good social network. Google’s Picasa’s arguably a better photo sharing site than Facebook’s (even after the recent revamp); Google’s YouTube videos must be one of the most shared items on Facebook; data from Gmail could help them quickly construct the social graph. I still think they’re playing catch-up, and would still back Facebook to win this war, but egosurfing might help Google in the fight.
