Google Profiles

Yet another product from Google. This time it is Google Profiles. It is a single stop for connecting all your Google Profiles (Gmail, Orkut, Picasa, etc.). So now you need to update stuff at just one place for it to reflect everywhere.

Apart from that, how I see it, for consumers, this is like a mini – Orkut. Mini because you don’t need to write about yourself for that 1 hour which it takes to make an Orkut Profile. This is just a 5 min exercise where you will put in your place of birth, where you have studied, and stayed. A few other details here and there. So if you want to search for people from your school who you haven’t contacted for years, you can use the Google Search Profile option which will take you to all people who are from that place. Orkut of course has a perfect search algorithm, where even if you make as have as an alphabet out of place, the search will not return relevant results. But Google Profiles use the regular Google search algorithm, which significantly corrects your search. A very plain example, if you search for “College of Engg TVM”, it will also return results from College of Engineering Trivandrum.

Now, let’s look at it from Google’s perspective. Why would Google want to do this (apart from the fact that it is useful for people in general :-)). This is to build a huge, structured database of characteristics of people. And why would they do that? To further improve their content advertising. You might have already noticed the ads you get on the right doing your Google searches or in Gmail. These are based on a lot of things like what you search for, what your previous searches have been, and what your IP address is. With the “what you search for”, they match it with keywords that advertisers have bought (called Google Adwords), and if there is a match, then they put up that ad. Similarly in Gmail, the ads you see on the right come up because some of your mail content looks like it matches with what an advertiser is hoping for when he / she is looking for a target customer. And finally, your IP address – that tells Google that you are probably sitting in India, or to be more specific, say Mumbai, and hence Mumbai based ads would be most relevant.

Google has always been trying to improve how they display ads to us. Some examples have been the Google SearchWiki – where if you have logged in to any Google account when you search, the results will be even more relevant to you, and you can customize how you see results. By doing this they were actually collecting what you search, and then improving their ads.

Now have a look at Google Profiles – they take basic data about you. Now with this data, they are going to be able to better make their algorithms to ensure the ads they put up are more relevant on their pages. This way there is a better probability that the ads would get clicked and therefore a greater probability that Google gets the money from ads.

To access your Google Profile, click here.