

The Rise and Fall Of Google Authorship For Search Results - adamcarson
http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975

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rbinv
"We all like to think that Google has infinite processing power. They don’t.
If they did have such power, they would use optical character recognition to
read text in images, image processing techniques to recognize pictures, speech
to text technology to transcribe every video they encounter online, and they
would crawl every page on the web every day, and so forth, but they don’t."

I am actually pretty certain Google does most (if not all) of that. Thus, I
doubt this has anything to do with processing power - after all, it's not that
much additional data.

As with any other "known, positive" ranking signal, mostly SEO-savvy sites
implemented rel="author" markup. However, Google must have anticipated this,
so it's probably something else.

Overall, I'm actually surprised Google relied on explicit markup to accurately
detect authorship. They are probably able to do so anyway. Maybe the purpose
was just another push for Google+?

