Google trying to compete with Facebook’s public profiles?

One of the best ways to keep up with Google’s latest products and updates is to monitor the robots.txt file on http://www.google.com. The most recent addition is a sitemap index that points to nearly 30 individual sitemaps which in turn list Google public profile pages. The limit for a single sitemap file is 50,000 URLs so Google is attempting to get approximatly 1450000 public profile page indexed.

These profiles have existed for a while and are part of your Google Account, however it’s not widley known how much detail you can provide within them. For example you can include information on your current and previous locations, where you’ve been employed as well as a short biography. There is also an opportunity to include links with configurable link text and these links don’t include the nofollow attribute.

It’s possibly Google is looking to compete with Facebook and possibly Linkedin for searches on individuals names, locations and employment, the addition of a function to link to profiles of friends coupled with gmail and Google Talk would pretty much make this system into a basic social network.