Google has officially brought an end to the authorship system for search results. The search engine announced on Thursday that search results relating to articles will no longer have the names of authors associated with them.
Since the proper adoption of the authorship markup was very low, Google repeatedly attempted to reinforce the importance of associating a name with online articles, going as far as to say that pages tied to Google + verified profiles might be considered more relevant than anonymous ones.
Sadly, the feature didn't work out as well as expected, and after playing with authorship for three years, Google finally decided to cull the feature. They have been gradually decreasing the prominence of authorship over the last few months, leading to speculation that the feature was due to be culled. In June they removed Google+ profile photos from the search results, and also stopped showing Google+ follower counts.
The general observations being made about these updates stated that it was just not worthwhile for Google to focus on these details any more. It was better for Google to stop tweaking it and letting it die away before it caused further agony.
It's not clear if the Google authorship is gone forever. It is possible that the concept of semantic search may reveal other ways of identifying authors of various online documents. So far, it is clear that methods that involve actions from humans, namely webmasters, are more or less doomed, since humans are subject to errors and misunderstandings more than we would like to admit. Automation can make this identification much more reliable, so it is possible to see some new approaches in this direction coming from Google engineers and technicians.
However, after three years of experimenting with this feature, Google management has concluded that readers did not find it as valuable as they thought it would be and that it could even pose a distraction.
Since the proper adoption of the authorship markup was very low, Google repeatedly attempted to reinforce the importance of associating a name with online articles, going as far as to say that pages tied to Google + verified profiles might be considered more relevant than anonymous ones.
Sadly, the feature didn't work out as well as expected, and after playing with authorship for three years, Google finally decided to cull the feature. They have been gradually decreasing the prominence of authorship over the last few months, leading to speculation that the feature was due to be culled. In June they removed Google+ profile photos from the search results, and also stopped showing Google+ follower counts.
The general observations being made about these updates stated that it was just not worthwhile for Google to focus on these details any more. It was better for Google to stop tweaking it and letting it die away before it caused further agony.
It's not clear if the Google authorship is gone forever. It is possible that the concept of semantic search may reveal other ways of identifying authors of various online documents. So far, it is clear that methods that involve actions from humans, namely webmasters, are more or less doomed, since humans are subject to errors and misunderstandings more than we would like to admit. Automation can make this identification much more reliable, so it is possible to see some new approaches in this direction coming from Google engineers and technicians.
However, after three years of experimenting with this feature, Google management has concluded that readers did not find it as valuable as they thought it would be and that it could even pose a distraction.
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