Google announced that Google Apps admins can now set the default state for profile discoverability in their domain through a control in the admin console if they have enabled Premium Features. It is checked by default, making profiles discoverable in public web searches.

At launch, all users with discoverability on will get the admin default, and those with it off will be unaffected by the default, since it had already been set as such.

In the future, changing the admin default will change the user’s setting if the user hasn’t set discoverability. Once they manually set their profile discoverability setting off or on, that setting will continue regardless of whether the admin default is changed.

“In domains where an admin sets profile discoverability to be off by default (i.e., unchecks the setting), users may still want to be able to discover their co-workers in the same domain,” Google explains in a blog post. “To enable this functionality, we extended Google+ to leverage contact sharing. If the admin has enabled contact sharing for services such as Gmail then co-workers will be suggested in autocomplete results irrespective of their discoverability setting.”

The changes affect Google Apps for Business, Education and Government.

Image via Google