LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Profiles in Google Results
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009Google is experimenting with pulling through additional information from various social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and their own Google Profiles. The search results are displaying not only a simple link to the site, but creating “added value” by selectively displaying additional information contained within the social networking profiles.
I’m seeing more of this activity in the .com version of Google; some of these are not yet available in the .co.uk version, but I would suspect it is only a matter of time.
I have seen Google pulling through a snippet of information from my LinkedIn profile, inserting an additional line of information regarding my job title:

As for Facebook profiles, Google is now also displaying an extra line of text showing who your friends are. Is this a good idea, or not such a good idea? Apologies to whomever Mary Smith is for using her as an example:
And finally, Google is choosing to also display users’ own Google Profile in the search results, as well as prompts to discover people using other social networking sites like Classmates and MySpace. I’m not entirely sure how I ended up with two Google profiles, but that is something I need to get fixed:


