Google opens up your profile to search engines

Google has been letting people create profiles for a while now — you can see mine here, and you can create yours here. Until today, your public profile that you created has remained hidden from search engines.
Just about a half hour ago, Google added a new line into their robots.txt file which makes all those profiles (or at least 50,000 of them) crawl-able by search engines. The new entry tells search engines to use “http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml” as a sitemap. The sitemap looks something like this:

http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/sitemap-000.txt
2008-10-15
http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/sitemap-001.txt
2008-10-15

In that file, you can see it lists 30 static files — each of which contain a whole slew of URL’s to public profiles. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for these profiles to show up in Google search results — and when they do, how they look. I’m sure Google will be creating a special One Box to show “people results” at some point.