Google opens up your profile to search engines

Google has been letting people create profiles for a while now -- you can see mine here, and you can create yours here. Until today, your public profile that you created has remained hidden from search engines.

Just about a half hour ago, Google added a new line into their robots.txt file which makes all those profiles (or at least 50,000 of them) crawlable by search engines. The new entry tells search engines to use "http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml" as a sitemap. The sitemap looks something like this:

http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/sitemap-000.txt 2008-10-15

http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/sitemap-001.txt 2008-10-15

In that file, you can see it lists 30 static files -- each of which contain a whole slew of URL's to public profiles. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for these profiles to show up in Google search results -- and when they do, how they look. I'm sure Google will be creating a special OneBox to show "people results" at some point.

Do you have any problems with Google allowing search engines to index your profile? Let's hear what you think in the Talk Back!