Search Footprint of Popular Sites

I was trying to compare search engines... what with all the buzz about bing and google caffeine. So, to test them out, among other things, I searched my own name and a few friends' name. And guess what? The only relevant links were from facebook.com. 3 or 4 links from my own facebook page and a few from my friends' pages. And of course Linked in home pages. What happened to all the tons of other sites I'm registered on. There are so many places I've described myself, listed my interests hobbies! If someone knew it was my birthday and looked up my name on Google, how would they find out that I love games? That I love House M.D.? If they don't know, how will I get all the gifts?

Try this: search "orkut " or "yahoo ". It doesn't pull up your public profile!

Now, seriously. I see a marketing opportunity here! Search for someone and you should get all their profiles on various sites. You should see what they've been upto and what keeps them interested and busy.

In fact, the situation is so bad that rarely ever do you see profiles from websites other than the ones you take the initiative of logging into to check on your friends.

Is there any benefit from this?

Its good for the social sites:
If at all I browse for a name and find listings only from facebook and linked in... would I try other sites? Websites try to make it easy for their users to find links among their millions of users, so that they stay and connect through their websites. Why not let them use their favourite google search to get to your site?

Its good for the net citizen:
I would love to register at xyz.com if I google friends' names, and find that they already have profiles on xyz.com!

Its also good for google:
Google will become the friend-finder of choice... and get us to all the awesome websites where we can hang out. And in those profile pages, the websites can display google ads relevent to the profile being viewed, and the visitor will end up sending a gift, or something. Even think of this scenario... I look up a friend whose hobbies include yoga, and there's nice little yoga-class ad sitting right there near the orkut profile page! I'm sure it adds value for every one involved.

How to fix this?
Of course, this is exactly what Facebook has fixed recently with its user home pages. But, static links are not really necessary. Only the pages should be available without Whatever uid the website uses for the person's profile is irrelevant to me... google will take me to the profile page. I'm sure web developers are realising this, but it is important for the big ones to keep up, or they'll get beaten by the newbies who use their heads. For eg., I think twitter is, on a basic level, just GTalk status message logging. Orkut could/should have figured this out themselves... and done something about it!

What about privacy?
Of course, all this doesn't mean you compromise on privacy and security. Obviously, a public domain listing of my profile should be there only if I've chosen "make my profile to all visitors". And again, my "public profile" need only have information about me that I wish to make public, and not stuff like contact information and mail Ids. To get those details, they would have to login in to that website and "add as friend" or something.