Today I noticed a change in my Google search results. When searching I noticed a G+ profile was linked off to the right of the results even though the person was not in my circles. When I dig some digging I found out that person worked for the company they were listed next to. Taking this a bit further I did a few specific searches with results that were (almost) expected.

When digging into Danny Sullivan‘s profile you can see he wasn’t in my circles and is indeed the Editor-in-Chief for Search Engine Land.

I then took it one step further and did a search for Mashable, expecting a profile link to Pete Cashmore. However the results were a bit different than I expected as you can see below.

Again I dug into the profile to see what the relationship between the profile and results were. To no surprise Sarah Kessler is a reporter for Mashable.

So what does this mean for brands? The hope is that Google will be linking search results directly to our brand pages for further social exposure during searches. Time will tell where this leads, but we sure hoping they don’t start linking random employees next to results.

I will update more later as I’m able to test this further. What have you seen in your tests? Let me know in the comments.