Yep. Soon Google crawlers will be indexing orkut profiles and everyone on orkut will be googlable. In simple terms you can use google search to find your friends’ orkut profile and your friends can do same to find you!
Although there is no official post regarding this on any Google or Orkut official blog, a new privacy setting – "orkut in google search results", indicates just this.
By default this setting is configured to show your orkut information in search results! That’s why you don’t need to do anything to appear in google search.
Those who are concern about privacy can choose "hide information" option. There is no fine grained control like facebook provides. So better opt for hiding if you have doubt on how this feature will be used (or abused).
Three months back facebook opened their user database for search engines and considering facebooks that move this should not surprise anyone.
Also can orkut do this as sensibly as facebook did?
Related: Read how facebook did that!
10 Comments
nice
i noticed that there is an option in my privacy settings.
i was searching, if google have already indexed some profiles, but nope, they haven’t.
but i found some other interesting links i haven’t seen before
http://www.orkut.com/orkut_igoogle.xml
http://www.orkut.com/Join.aspx?id=472EF47D5DFB69B4
http://www.orkut.com/Join.aspx?id=474282BB37220F73
http://www.orkut.com/Join.aspx?id=474282BB37220F73
http://www.orkut.com/Join.aspx?id=472EF45C1E524EF6
i also tried to fake my browser’s user agent, but this didn’t help. i wonder if they have opened profiles only for their bot ip’s or they are populating google search data internally (which means bad luck for other search engines).
@Nobody
First Sorry for late reply as I went offline for Xmas vacations! 🙁
Yeah. Even I tried searching with following query!
[b]site:www.orkut.com inurl:profile.aspx[/b]
There was only one absolute profile link and thats too with wrong title! 🙁
Google seems slow in execution…
anyway wishin you merry xmas and a very happy new year!
-Rahul 🙂
seems it’s not like facebook does it
http://help.orkut.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=78628&query=search&topic=&type=
it’s more like this
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/07/google-onebox-results.html
@Nobody
Forgot to see this earlier! Great finding!
Will update this post… 🙂
Also this means the only link i was getting with search query mentioned in above comment is coincidence and have nothing to do with new feature! 🙁
By the way I really like this magical OneBox method but I think it operates differently compare to normal search engine!
I think instead of normal crawling and indexing of orkut profile google may directly talk to the orkuts database server and will create search engine index directly on database. This will be highly accurate (as OneBox search results) and too fast as indexing on database will eliminate HTTP or any other type of network resource which needed for crawling web pages!
This also means Yahoo and other search engine have no donuts this time! 🙁
By the way I really like the way you explored this and related the things nicely! 🙂
Nice post
@Gadgets
First Sorry for late reply as I went offline for Xmas vacations! 🙁
Thanks for nice and encouraging words… wishin you merry xmas and a very happy new year!
-Rahul
I found this in the wild for my own photo! Check my blog for the screenshot 🙂
can google search the comments and scraps on orkut?
@sheryar
technically it is possible as both Google and Orkut are from same people, but I don’t they will do this as it may affect privacy of orkut users.
great stuff thanks for sharing.