From early August users across India can now find out more about their friends, colleagues, and business contacts, through Google’s new feature on their mobile phones.
Google has rolled out a new feature for India called People Cards— a Google Search feature that lets users create a virtual visiting card, highlight their existing website or social profiles.
This new feature is aimed at helping individuals, influencers, entrepreneurs or anyone else out there who wants to be discovered. Users across India can now discover these new People Cards by searching the name of their friends or colleagues on mobile in English.
Google has said that they rolled out People Cards in India first because the special affinity people in the world’s second-largest internet market have shown for looking up their own name on Google. Currently, People Cards only supports English but this is something that is expected to be updated with time.
So how does it work?
Users can search for their name on Google, while signed into their Google account. This will bring up a new option – “Add Me to search”. Clicking on this button will open a form that acts as a profile setup, asking for information to be displayed on this new People Card feature. You can add a bio, links to your website, social media accounts, and optionally phone number, address, and work / education details. From the initial outlook, this appears to be like a miniature in-search LinkedIn-esque profile. Like LinkedIn and other social media, it is completely free to use and simply allows users to have another way to advertise themselves and their businesses.
Google has said the more information that users provide, the more easily others will find them on Google search such as finding them via the school they went to or their phone number rather than their name alone. Of course, it is optional so if the idea of someone being able to find you within Google search is something that does not appeal, don’t worry as this is an optional feature.
Google has also assured that they have put several measures in place to curb potential misuse of the new feature. Such as you can only create one Card per Google account.
“We have a number of mechanisms to protect against abusive or spammy content, and if you come across low-quality information or a card that you believe was created by an impersonator, you can tap the feedback link to let us know. If you no longer want your People Card to appear in Search, you can delete it at any time,”
wrote Lauren Clark, product manager for Search at Google, in a blog post.
People Cards are a clear sign of Google’s latest step to bring people more functionality to reduce users’ reliance on other services. This new feature is arguably aimed at LinkedIn. While you can’t add a connection on Google Search as you can on LinkedIn, the signs are still there. Google wants to be king of all and steps like this make that prospect all the more likely in the future. At least it’s not as bad as Google Plus……..
In 2017 Google added job listings to search with their new feature, Google Jobs, which adds a large panel to the top of any search allowing for job searches to quickly and easily find and compare job opportunities. It takes these from all across the web including LinkedIn and its own platform, Google Careers. Since its launch, it has become hugely popular in the USA.
Personally I think this is an interesting step for Google to take, especially with the Beta of Google Currents just being launched for G-Suite customers. (Google Currents is a Google + updated, revived and made better). I’m curious to see how popular People Cards will be outside of India once the launch is made elsewhere, but I think this is an interesting opportunity for entrepreneurs and business owners alike, as People Cards are sure to increase visibility for personal brands and smaller businesses.
Let us know what you think, will you use the People Cards feature if and when it’s released over here?
