“Why would Google want to encourage people to create profiles of themselves? Because it aims to take on Facebook. By promising improved vanity searches, the thinking goes, Google is getting us to tell the company a lot more about ourselves. In the process, it’s garnering enough information to build the world’s largest social network—and make a fortune besides.”Manjoo, Farhad. “Google’s Trojan Horse.” Slate Magazine. 30 Apr 2009
Google is already the 800-pound gorilla in the Internet universe—the perfect example of “those that have always get more.” When you’re the most frequently visited website—1.5 billion hits per day as of today—you keep inviting even more visits.
Now the geniuses at Google have given us another reason to visit their site. It’s called a Google Profile (just type in those words), a page on their site that you create, and continually update, that presents you in the best light to the whole world. In other words, you get to control exactly what people see when they look up your name.
This is part of a fast growing Internet industry called “online reputation management.” Since anyone can write anything they want about you, without any editorial control or censorship, it becomes extremely important that what shows up on Google is what you want to see there.
Google will probably get hundreds of millions of people to create their Google Profiles, but that’s only one-tenth of their strategy. Once they have your self-created profile, they can then create and sell custom-designed advertising campaigns directed just to you, based on their record of what you have searched for on their site.
In my case, they have dozens of Google searches over the past ten years. They know my tastes, my interests, and which products and services I am likely to buy. Whenever I go to my site, I will see dozens of focused advertisers appealing to my wallet. This is a winning strategy. I like it. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel special.
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