Google will no longer display the names of authors in its search results

Himanshu Arora

Posts: 902   +7
Staff

Google search results will not display names of authors associated with articles anymore, bringing an end to the company's Authorship experiment. The search giant had already stopped showing the Google+ profile photos and Google+ follower count numbers in late June.

"Authorship markup is no longer supported in web search", the company announced on its official authorship support page.

Google first unveiled its plan for authorship markup in June 2011. The idea behind the experiment was to allow authors to link their published content to their Google+ profile, allowing users to identify quality content creators and authors to gain followers.

But after a three-year experiment, the Mountain View, California-based company has concluded that the program wasn't as useful to their users as they’d hoped, and "can even distract from those results", Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller wrote in a Google+ post.

Muller noted that Authorship didn’t increase the traffic to articles, so its removal shouldn't cause a dip in traffic either. He also said that the change doesn’t impact other social features, as the search engine will continue showing Google+ posts from friends and pages when they’re relevant to the query, both in the main results, and on the right-hand side.

The news comes just a few months after senior vice president and head of Google+, Vic Gundotra, parted ways with the company after nearly eight years on the job.

Permalink to story.

 
Google also doesn't tell names, addresses, or email addresses of people who bought an android app. When they want to return it, it's very difficult to find out who they are. I had 2 returns so far who informed me by email, and both were bogus and were never charged. People are returning them automatically, and they say they have a 15 minute time limit, but they don't and people download my app and return it when they learn they can do it via website, me losing sales. It is also impossible to send more than one email per run of an app without user intervention, and impossible to even shut the phone down or even restart it via an app. Pcs were the opposite extreme, and here they went to such restrictions. I bet apple is looser.
 
Back