Google Makes User Profiles Indexable at Gstatic

[douglas9]

A few days ago, Google added a link to a Sitemap XML file in their robots.txt. The Sitemap is hosted at gstatic.com (I wonder why?) and contains links to long lists of public Google user profile URLs. A typical URL contains – optionally – an avatar image or photo, name, location, bio, links* and more. If you’re logged in, you can find your own profile at google.com/s2/profiles/me.

There might be as many as 132,000+** individual profiles on Gstatic right now, but that’s just based on a rough calculation, and Dan Goodwin at iCrossing says many more profiles would fit. Dan suspects that it may be possible that “Google is looking to compete with Facebook and possibly Linkedin for searches on individuals names, locations and employment”. (Note that Google has the data stored already without indexing it, of course, though crawling from a public source perhaps offers different possibilities of inclusion for them... and other search engines out there.)

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-10-21-n32.html