To compete with Facebook, Myspace and other social networking sites, Google created a new feature: Google profiles. Similar to those sites, anyone with a Google or Gmail account can set up a profile by filling in basic personal and professional information.

Categories to fill in include location, current employer, previous jobs schools attended and a short biography.

The basic idea is to let users control (at least partially) their online identity. If people don’t like the results that come up when their name is Googled, they can now have at least some say in what searchers find. Now when a name is searched, the bottom of the page features a special section for profile results.