[Update: Images] Google to let people create their own ‘profile cards’ for Search, Chrome

Kyle Bradshaw | Feb 27 2020 - 7:48 am PT

When you Google someone’s name, if they’re famous enough, a full Knowledge Graph card will appear with their description, social media, and more. In India, Google is testing letting far more people create their own “profile card” to appear in Google searches for their name, as well as in Chrome.

As spotted by Android Police, Google has posted three new support pages that detail the ability to “search for people on Google,” how to “create your profile card,” and how to edit or remove it once it’s been created. Essentially, Google is creating a way for people to design their own Knowledge Graph card and decide for themselves what appears when someone Googles their own name.

To make the profile card creation process easier and more consistent, Google will let you build from a variety of templates or, if necessary, start from scratch. From there, you should be able to add public contact info along with your social media handles.

According to one of the support pages, these profile cards are launching first to a limited number of Google users in India who have their language set to English. Further limiting the feature’s availability, profile cards can currently only be seen and created from mobile devices, not from desktop.

What should be interesting to see is how well Google is able to differentiate two people with the same name. For example, our own Stephen Hall shares his name with an actor from Australia, and Google’s Knowledge Graph for the actor includes Twitter info for the journalist. To that end, the same support page suggests that Google may simply return multiple cards to let you figure out which one is the person you’re looking for.

Note: If you find multiple cards, the information on the cards will help you find who you’re searching for.

Or, if your profile card is designed well, people will be able to add an extra word or two to their search. Using our above example, we could search for “Stephen Hall journalist” to find the correct card.

If you share a name with someone famous, you might need to add a distinguishable term to your profile. This term will help other people in their search query. For example, “Aamir Khan food Blogger” or “Aamir Khan tutor.”

Profile cards in Google Chrome

But why would anyone want to create a public profile for Google? The answer to that may actually lie in Chrome.

Last year, we found evidence that Google Chrome was working on a similar “profile card” feature. From what we read in the code, it seems Chrome is going to add a button to the address bar that shows the Google Search Knowledge Graph info for the creator of the webpage that you’re currently on.

[…] we dug in a little deeper to see what this latest “Profile Card” experiment has in store. From what we can gather, a new button will be added on the right-hand side of the Omnibox, Google Chrome’s name for its multipurpose address bar. Instead of an icon, however, this button will show the social media profile picture of the creator responsible for the page you’re currently on.

Tapping this new button will pop up the eponymous “Profile Card,” revealing a trove of information about that web content creator, including their name, a short bio, and what social media platforms they’re on. All of the information for this card will be generated automatically by Google using the current page’s URL.

At the time, we thought the feature would be of fairly limited use, as many fantastic web creators aren’t “famous” enough to have their own profile appear in Google Search. However, seeing this new ability for people to create their own profile in Google Search shines a brand new light on Chrome’s upcoming profile card capabilities.

Putting it together, it seems to me that these profile cards are squarely intended to make the great content from web creators of all varieties — everything from “tutors” to “food Bloggers” as seen above — easier to discover.

So far, we haven’t been able to spot profile cards in the wild, but you may be able to help. If you’re in India, try searching for “add me to Google” from your phone and let us know what happens, down in the comments!

Update 11:30am: Reader Vidhan Raut was able to give us a quick demonstration of creating his own profile card and what it looks like when he searches for himself.