Google's Trojan HorseDid the search giant just sneakily launch a Facebook killer?

For years, Google has had me all wrong. Type my name into the search engine and, amid a catalog of my many amazing achievements, you'll find the most scurrilous stuff: This guy thinks I'm an idiot, someone else says I'm misguided, and Wikipedia calls me "an avid Facebook enthusiast," which is a crude exaggeration. I'm not alone; for many people, vanity searching can be an irresistible but crushing exercise, like asking a plastic surgeon to scrutinize your face. Is that really how the world sees me? You're shattered if Google says something nasty about you, but you're also shattered if Google says nothing about you. It's no wonder that "online reputation management" is a growth industry.

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Now Google itself is offering some solace. Last week, the company gave self-Googlers more power to control their online image. Now, in addition to everything else that Google turns up on a vanity search, it will also display a link to your Google Profile—a page that Google is encouraging everyone to create. Type in "farhad manjoo," and at the bottom of the first page you'll see a link to my profile, which leaves out the nasty bits—I tell the world about my job, my schooling, my link-blog, and my book but not that some people on the Web have accused me of villainy.

In a blog post, Brian Stoler, a Google software engineer, wrote that the company is adding profiles to search results in order to "give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name." That sounds sensible enough. But some observers see a more ambitious agenda. Why would Google want to encourage people to create profiles of themselves? Because it aims to take on Facebook. By promising improved vanity searches, the thinking goes, Google is getting us to tell the company a lot more about ourselves. In the process, it's garnering enough information to build the world's largest social network—and make a fortune besides.

If the speculation proves true, Google's plan would be both deviously brilliant and also a little scary. Why would Google want a social network? To get to know you better—and, thus, to serve you more profitable ads. Google has long made gobs of money by running ads based on search keywords—if you search for "shoes," Google runs spots for Zappos and DSW, and it makes a few cents if you click on them. But last month Google announced that it would join many of its rival Web companies in adopting "behavioral targeting," a method of serving ads that relies on a much more extensive picture of your online activity. In the future, instead of showing you an ad targeted simply to your search keyword, Google might look at everything it has learned about you over an extended period of time in order to give you a message better-tailored to your interests. If you type in "shoes," Google might be able to tell if you're a nurse who lives in New York or a construction worker who lives in Miami—and would show you shoe ads customized to your character. (See this blog post for instructions on how to manage or opt out of Google's new ad plan.)

Here's where the social network might come in. Google already knows a lot about you; through its search engine, its vast advertising network, and its many Web applications (Gmail, YouTube, etc.), the company can probably already glean enough information about a Web surfer to be able to tell the difference between a nurse and a construction worker. But a Google social network would add one more dimension to the picture—it could mine your relationships, too. So if it found that your buds totally love Judd Apatow comedies, it might guess that you'd like them, too—and thus show you an ad for Funny People the next time you visit YouTube.

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.

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