Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wanna have zillions of google profiles?

google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–47 of 47 posts

Re: Wanna have zillions of google profiles?

#41

Post by dacort »

frognibble wrote: post #36
dacort wrote: post #33

The thing that really bugs me about Google profiles is that they're directly connected to email addresses. I guess Google thinks their ability to deal with spam is good enough that putting millions of their user's email address publicly available isn't a concern.

The email address is not displayed on the profile page. A user can customize his or her profile URL with an email address. The settings page clearly states that the email address is publicly discoverable if the email address is used in the profile URL.

Shouldn't I be allowed to customize my profile URL with a string other than my email address? Why force me to expose my email if I want something other than a 21-character numeric id?

Re: Wanna have zillions of google profiles?

#42

Post by ElbertF »

pixelbath wrote: post #39
ptn wrote: post #26

OK, I'll be that guy: what are we looking at here?

Alright, I'll be the other guy: what would this be useful for? Google profiles don't allow links, so SEO appears to be out. Just to do it?

Google profiles don't allow links?

http://www.google.com/profiles/112195136944637672112

Re: Wanna have zillions of google profiles?

#43

Post by blueberry »

joshfraser wrote: post #28
blueberry wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a big deal but I guess the author wanted to point out an easy way to crawl this public info. There are similar ways to crawl public Facebook profiles too, so it's really not a big deal.

pete warden tried that and got sued by facebook. they have since changed their robots.txt to forbid public crawling of their site although they still want the google juice so they make exceptions for major search engines.

I said you can _crawl_ in the sense that it's technically possible & easy. Also I don't think you'd get into trouble if you use it for your own research and not disclose your results.

Re: Wanna have zillions of google profiles?

#44

Post by joshfraser »

fdb wrote: post #19

It's interesting that the profiles list the public followers and following stats. With some deep crawling, you could build a huge social graph from this data.

you need to be signed in to google to see the followers/following data. it shouldn't be hard to pass a valid cookie along, but it might get a little suspicious for one user to make ~60m requests.

Re: Wanna have zillions of google profiles?

#45

Post by gscott »

ElbertF wrote: post #42
pixelbath wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, I'll be the other guy: what would this be useful for? Google profiles don't allow links, so SEO appears to be out. Just to do it?

Google profiles don't allow links? http://www.google.com/profiles/112195136944637672112

And none of the links have a nofollow tag.

Re: Wanna have zillions of google profiles?

#47

Post by frognibble »

dacort wrote: post #41
frognibble wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The email address is not displayed on the profile page. A user can customize his or her profile URL with an email address. The settings page clearly states that the email address is publicly discoverable if the email address is used in the profile URL.

Shouldn't I be allowed to customize my profile URL with a string other than my email address? Why force me to expose my email if I want something other than a 21-character numeric id?

I suspect that Google used email addresses because they already have tools for managing that namespace.
Post reply on HN