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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 s

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"

billyhoffman 12y ago
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.
- skynetv2 12y ago
  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.

billyhoffman 12y ago

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.

skynetv2 12y ago
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.