Putting Your Best Face Forward on Google

Have you “googled yourself” lately?  Some may think taking time to look up your own name on any major search engine is vanity. But for many who use the web as a business and networking tool, checking up on your online presence is as important as making certain the information on your business card is current and correct.

Last month, on its official blog, Google announced an enhancement to its user-created “Google Profile” feature that gives you increased control over the search results yielded in a Google search of your name:

To give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name, we've begun to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles. We've also added links so it's easy to search for the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn.

If you are concerned with your online presence on the web, now is a good time to spend some time refining your personal Google profile.  Chances are, if you are a preexisting Google user with an account, you may already have the beginnings of a profile created.  To create or add information to your Google profile, simply go to http://www.google.com/profiles and either create a new account or edit your profile with the information you would like included.  My profile, located at http://www.google.com/profiles/lisahendey includes my personal bio, links to all of my websites, and contact information that is visible only to my pre-approved contacts.  You may edit your contact preferences to provide this information to a more broad or very limited audience, or keep it entirely private.  Additionally, if you use Picasa, Flickr or other online photo services, you may choose to include photos on your Google profile.

Some in the blogosphere have already begun speculating about the detrimental effect of this move by Google as yet another power grab:

But someday, when Google needs more ad revenues, the walls within Google will fall.  Its spiders follow the links you gave it — it will classify your Flickr photos, root around in your blog posts and Twitter feeds, check out your friends and then it will be able to build a very complex profile of you in order to sell you to advertisers.

I’ve chosen to disregard these dire warnings and to update and refresh my personal Google profile with the information I want “out there” on the web.  Additionally, I use the Google Alerts feature to receive a daily email update on the latest Google results for my name.  Very frequently, these alerts have brought to my attention reprints of my articles, my name mentioned on blogs, and other circumstances where someone has written about me.  If you own a business or have your own website, you may also want to set up alerts for your website or business name to keep on top of this flow of information.

What do you think about the prospect of Google holding so much information about your personal data? If you’ve set up a Google Profile, what do you think about this service?  Does it concern you as it does the blog writer for Wired, or do you consider it a “fact of life” in today’s information age?  

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