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]
Not very charitable to either dismiss as a lie this section of the post[1] or else to comment without having read the short post at all.
[1] (If you’re curious -- in our tests, removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites. Nor does it increase clicks on ads. We make these kinds of changes to improve our users’ experience.)
I'm curious what their metric was for "user experience."
I did read that portion - but anyone who's done any work in search for very long knows that's google's response to most thing (the recent removal of exact match in ppc is meant to make the platform more accessible, but really just increases impressions / clicks by default and removes the fine tuning that you could do on an advanced level).
Me too. I did everything required to get my authorship to show up. Now that it's gone, it's kind of frustrating to have put in the effort. Just like it's frustrating to have no less than seven different g+ public interfaces, between my work account, business page, newer personal gmail account, older personal gmail account, account being used by my wife and myself, and these weird alternate Youtube versions of two or three of the above.
I called a client today to discuss them signing up for webmaster tools. The most frustrating part of the conversation was a discussion about dealing with the other Google "stuff" that comes with the new Google account they'll be making. Do they want to use the new email address for anything? What if it accidentally gets out? Etc.
That was the strangest part for me. Google+ forced an odd hybrid between my personal and business activities, but it wasn't absolute. I couldn't tell you how many google interfaces I have right now, I'd have to count them and go through a few while logged in to make sure it was complete.
It wasn't that much work, but I suspect they could have improved their user testing on how multiple identities worked.
Maybe they were just targeting the median user, but that is likely a mistake if you miss all the evangelists.
Note that you can sign up for a Google account without signing up for GMail. Just click the "I prefer to use my current email address" link underneath the username box in the signup flow.
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?
Maybe it's my ugly mug or the particular type of content that I serve, but having authorship markup drove my traffic down 1/3rd. I'm happy to see it go.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
Agreed. Authorship was supposed to be a revolution in search marketing. Author Rank was the new Page Rank. It was the Next Big Thing (TM). And now it's dead.
So this is a clear issue of misaligned priorities between content seekers and content providers I guess. I'm very very glad they went with the optimum for content seekers in this case.
It's less that the priorities are misaligned, and more that Google wasted the time of the content providers by recommending that they do something that is no longer going to be used.
Google is constantly changing the way results show up and ranking and content creators are always shuffling to get ahead, I don't see how this is any different from something like say, Panda, or any other periodic change to how Google presents information.
Gmail likely could have stood alone as a product (that is, I don't think it required promotion on google.com). It was a tremendous innovation at the time, on both interface, usability, and storage capacity. It leapfrogged hotmail by 100 fold on storage.
You know, if its a list of one item, its not really a list, so there is no need to pretend to footnote. This silly over-use of citation markup when it is completely unneeded adds to the smarmy faux-studiousness of comments on HN.
Just say Apr 2004, according to Wikipedia, was a long time ago. Don't pretend to use extra markup, don't imply a list of citations where there isn't one, and don't make a sentence for a human look like its been formatted for a computer.
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Or what it has to do with what I said.
I've been a user of Gmail since it entered beta. What's your point exactly?
If you have something to say, say it, don't be smug by linking to a wikipedia entry for Gmail, as though I don't already know what year it was created.
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?
Because leveraging bundling is illegal, if the bundled item is a monopoly, in both the US [1] and the EU. Further, leveraging their search monopoly in such a way as to juice other products is to the detriment of users: if the product deserves a given space in the search results (where deserves means would rise there without bundling), it should rise there on its own, or there is a better alternative that should have been there instead. Hence user harm.
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...
Do you believe android succeeded w/o juicing from other google businesses? I don't, I think.
The forced bundling of gmail, calendar, and maps (w/ turn-by-turn) where critical to android's success imo. Though I'd be curious for an argument otherwise.
The claim would have to be that Google couldn't have used any other alternatives. I believe that to be obviously false. Of course the market would have happily supplied options for mapping, calendar, and email - all Google would need to do is ask, or leave it open for users to decide regardless.
What was the alternative to iOS? There was nothing, only Android. That was true right up to the point where Microsoft rebuilt Windows mobile. iOS was not going to own 95% of the market no matter what Apple did, if only because people want to own different phones for fashion purposes. Android's strategy, plus an open market of app alternatives to the bundled software, you get the same result.
Hardware manufacturers needed something as close to an iOS clone as reasonable without literally duplicating it, and that's what Android was.
> succeeded w/o juicing from other google businesses?
Now you're changing the terms of the question ... getting a a boost from other businesses is different from "bundling". You didn't get sent an Android phone, nor in any way forced to use one, when you signed up for Gmail, or started using Youtube. Those services were very nicely supportd on the iPhone before the first Android phone ever launched. If you're going to say any positive association at all counts then they've never produced a an independent product since the original Google search, but that's not a very interesting statement - why would they launch something new and not make it work with their phones? It would be stupid and actually put them at a competitive disadvantage compared to the iPhone.
Bundling of a product means that you are forced to buy it even though you don't want it, to get a different product from the same provider that you do want. So your cable provider won't sell you HBO on its own, you have to take 20 other channels you have no interest in. It is not bundling of Android because you can get Google search, GMail, etc. all without Android. There is no other product that Google sells where they force you also to take Android in order to get it. You can make the reverse argument - that Google Search, GMail, etc. are bundled with Android. But that is bundling of GMail, Search, etc, not bundling of Android.
It's an opinion, of course, but I disagree. I think Android would have done just fine without google apps. Indeed plenty of android phones are sold without them. If the Amazon Fire fails, it will be because there are already cheaper phones with bigger app stores, not because it doesn't have gmail.
why are you excluding China? A few hundred million of Android phones without Google services isn't enough of a proof that Android is a great product even without Google services?
It's a weird market for political reasons, including the chinese government's attempt to grow domestic software and industries. Partly due to this, they're not really part of the same internet market as anyone else -- notice how all of china's big internet companies are home grown. So I don't think it's really proof of much.
Well, now that's an entirely different question. "Would Android have worked without google apps?" versus "Can a stripped version of Android compete with an entrenched Google Apps version of Android." Big difference. Either way, the lack of access to Google Play apps hurts Amazon Fire a lot more than lack of bundling with any previous Google services.
I wanted a big-screen phone that I could run my own apps on and put them on the web for other people to download (without needing to buy a mac to develop on, or pay apple for a developer certificate). Something to replace my PDA (an ASUS A730W running windows mobile 2003 - still quite a nice device but my phone now does everything it did). The Google integration made very little difference to the appeal; I might well have gone for a windows phone if they hadn't been in a process of multiple incompatible OS rewrites, or one of the Nokia Linux phones if they hadn't been a total mess. For me at least, Android was just in the right place at the right time.
I think you're misunderstanding the term "forced bundling" here.
The forced bundling being opposed here is that people who just want to use YouTube, Google Talk or Gmail are forced to get Google+ accounts and create Google+ profiles.
If you want to use Google Maps, Gmail, Calendar, you're not forced to buy an Android phone. They work fine on the desktop and they even support apps on iOS.
> The forced bundling of gmail, calendar, and maps (w/ turn-by-turn) where critical to android's success imo. Though I'd be curious for an argument otherwise.
People wanted smartphones that didn't cost an arm and a leg. That's the basis of Android's success. The Google apps are a nice to have.
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.
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.”
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?
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?
I have seen these.
I use G+ heavily, there is a great Android dev community that use it to communicate.
I sometimes stumble on a post that matches my google search query. It is extremely useful and does not feel invasive since it matches my query.
It just appears like a normal search result, with the contact picture.
The only time I've seen this is when I'm searching for more information on a topic that I've already written about and "shotgun shared" (FB, Twitter, G+...). Then it "helpfully" clutters up the search results with my own post. Suboptimal.
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.
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
[1] https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PDkPdPtjL6j