Google is back with yet another feature called ‘People Cards’. Through this feature, users will have the ability to have their virtual public profiles on the search engine. The virtual public profiles can be created through the visiting cards that can, in turn, be created as a part of the new feature.
The kind of information that can be added is – a person’s occupation, the social media sites they are active on along with providing a brief bio about themselves. All this information will appear on Google search once the People Cards are created.
At the moment, the feature of People Cards will be made available in India only. This particular feature has been under trial in the country for quite some time and it gives an experience of having a virtual visiting card. To get started with the People Cards feature one must provide their mobile numbers and also have a google account to enable the functionality of the feature.
“You may be wondering why we’re launching this feature in India first,” mentioned Lauren Clark, Google Search product manager, to Gadgets 360. “We are always looking for new ways to make search more useful for people, and we found that there were some unique information needs to India that we could help serve first,” she added.
So, let us take a look into how we can get started with People Cards. A user needs to log in to the Google account on their mobile devices to create the public profile. However, it is to be noted that the feature is only available in English for the time being. But, hopefully, other languages will soon be added in the coming months.
The next step would need the user to search the phrase “add me to search” while being logged in to the Google account. Google will take the user to a new page that allows the user to create their virtual visiting card.
The required mandatory fields are name, occupation, location, and an “about” bio, along with which some other information can be added such as education, where one lives and links to their website and other social media details, and even email and phone number if the user is comfortable with adding the same for public viewing.
Notably, there’s always a risk with public profiles being misused. There can be harassers online who could manipulate this information or also could give out sensitive information. Google, however, says that it is aiming to provide “helpful and reliable information” to the public. It gives the option to all users to flag abuse, impersonation, or even low-quality content if a user finds anything inappropriate with the information on People Cards.
Check out Google’s blog post here.