
Google removes authorship from search results - iamben
https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/HZf3KDP1Dm8
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Kortaggio
It seems to me that Google's motivation for starting author snippets in search
was to drive more people to sign up for Google Plus. Now that they've
discovered it's either (1) not working, or (2) enough people have already
signed up for G+, it makes sense to keep search uncluttered from the UX
standpoint. You can see this steady move away from authorship snippets
starting from when they first removed profile pictures.[1]

[1]
[https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PDkPdPtjL6j](https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PDkPdPtjL6j)

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blueskin_
Google's love of metro-ifying everything and removing useful features clashes
with google's love of foisting google+ onto unwilling users. Civil war,
anyone?

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lnanek2
Fortunately, G+ has been losing lately.

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blueskin_
Whoever wins, we lose.

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skynetv2
This was a very useless "enhancement" to the search page and its sole purpose
was to get more people signed up for G+ so they names and photos can be shown
in search.

For most users, a picture and name dont mean anything unless they are super
famous or is an author the user follows closely. if the user loves that
author, the user already knows which website is credible because authors
typically are on one site they publish. some cross publish but in most cases,
there is a primary site. so the user intrinsically knows what is a trustworthy
result.

even if we were to assign some weight to the author, as a user I dont need to
know who wrote it. I trust Google to present me with trustworthy articles
instead of wasting space and distracting my attention from the results.

this was a very horrible move on Google's part along with a bunch of other
useless "enhancements"

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billyhoffman
I disagree. You are blurring 2 concepts here, and are throwing out the baby
with the bath water. Decouple the "social network" junk of Google+ from the
concept of validated authorship.

Authorship is valuable. Show me everything that Jane Example wrote. Yes, on
her personal blog, but also in her column for Wired. And didn't she used to
write for the WSJ, or the Guardian? Those too.

Cite systems like this have existed in academia for over a decade. Google's
entire existence, as well as PageRank, grew from Larry and Sergey's Backrub
project at Stanford which, you guessed it, ranked academic papers and authors
based on which other papers/authors cited them, and in turn how those
papers/authors ranked.

Authorship at the index/search level is more powerful and comprehensive that
other approaches. Yes, Jane could keep a website with links to all her
articles. How up-to-date is that? What happens when the WSJ redesigns and
those links 404, even though her content still exists, just in a new location?
The model shouldn't be "I am Jane, and I wrote this thing that's located over
there." Authorship needs to be coupled to the content.

I have not liked Google+ at all. But is a step backward to abandon the concept
of authorship entirely.

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skynetv2
I'm taking specifically about linking authorship and Google+ and including
photos in search results with names. Google can still make it possible to
search by author without needing up search results.

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joelrunyon
This stuff is really bothersome because they didn't ask nicely - they forced
all google users to use G+. In doing so, they screwed up a bunch of perfectly
fine services.

Now they're trying to un-screw-up what they spent the last 3 years doing and
pretend like it's not a big deal.

I mean, I get it - Google can do what Google wants, but it doesn't do much for
their brand loyalty.

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reidrac
In some of the products there's not need to worry as there's not competence.
Well, it's basically search the service it doesn't really matter what they do.

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simonw
[http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-
authorship-201975](http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-
authorship-201975) is a good piece covering the history of this feature.

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codezero
I wonder why he says it's a difficult decision? What was the upside to users
or authors? If the data shows this is an improved experience for users it
should be a given and not difficult or something to apologize for.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Because not everyone has the same use cases. A positive change for _most_
users can be a negative for a few, and you don't ever want to be perceived as
saying "We're super excited to be screwing you, 'cause we don't care about
your needs!"

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codezero
Yeah, I'm most curious about who is negatively affected by this.

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donatj
I am. My sites traffic went way up after adding authorship to my posts.

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IBM
What was the last Google product that was successful without heavy bundling?
In this case, bundling couldn't overcome Facebook's network effects.

~~~
antoko
I guess that would depend on your definitions of "product", "successful" and
"heavy". Realistically if they are in a position to leverage any bundling -
why wouldn't they?

But here goes, in no particular order...

Google Public DNS - Dec 2009

Chromecast - July 2013

Chromebook - June 2011

Chrome Browser - Sept 2008

ChromeOS - May 2012

Nexus 4,5,7,10 - various starting Jan 2010

Golang - 2009

Dart - 2011

AngularJS - 2009

app engine - April 2008

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lnanek2
Would anyone really consider AppEngine successful? I hear so many support
horror stories, only one poorly supported open source project to try to move
off to without recoding to different APIs, and the price is ridiculous
compared to other cloud providers...

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scott_karana
At the very least, it's successful for _Google_ , since they appear to be
making some money from it.

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spindritf
Does google still recognize authorship? Many people in the SEO/marketing
community were really invested in the idea of AuthorRank and saw it as a
natural next step after PageRank.

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nkuttler
That's an excellent question. I mean, after all, social is the future of
search, right?

“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be
ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in
most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of
remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”

[http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-
intelligence/2013/02/01/the-f...](http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-
intelligence/2013/02/01/the-future-according-to-eric-7-points/)

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e15ctr0n
So first Google+ drops its real name policy [0] and now it's removing forced
integration with Search results? Great to see the forced integration of
Google+ with other Google properties being rolled back after Vic Gundotra's
departure. Nice work, Googlers! What's next?

[0]
[https://plus.google.com/u/0/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy](https://plus.google.com/u/0/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy)

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x0x0
I wonder if this is to get in front of anti-trust actions. They where clearly
using their search duopoly (US) and monopoly (EU) to juice google+.

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nkuttler
I seriously doubt that, it should have been pretty easy to integrate other
services besides G+. The truth is probably that authorship info sucks for many
users, and this isn't news either [https://www.jitbit.com/news/183-how-google-
authorship-decrea...](https://www.jitbit.com/news/183-how-google-authorship-
decreased-our-traffic-by-90/)

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aaronbrethorst

        It’s also worth mentioning that Search
        users will still see Google+ posts from
        friends and pages when they’re relevant
        to the query — both in the main results,
        and on the right-hand side. Today’s
        authorship change doesn’t impact these
        social features.
    

I don't think I've ever seen any of this before... Probably a testament to how
little I and my friends use G+. Has anyone else ever seen one of these? What
do they look like?

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kalleboo
> Has anyone else ever seen one of these? What do they look like?

Just did a test search and got some.
[http://mayoyo.tokyo/jyL.jpg](http://mayoyo.tokyo/jyL.jpg)

First result is organic, next two are G+ users I have in my circles. They
don't show up if I log out and perform the same search.

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BorisMelnik
Did authorship truly help anyone from an ROI or branding perspective? The
entire thing seemed like a huge failed experiment. I am sure it was just
removed because it took too much attention away from AdWords.

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archemike_
I've seen noticeable CTR on numerous campaigns with authorship as a great
picture would grab more attention. Maybe a 3-8% swing which is noticeable on
keywords with search volume >1000

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fiatjaf
I must confess I skipped the results that had photos in them. I hate photos.

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rwhitman
I'm pretty glad that's over with. Authorship was a pain in the ass

