Google drops authorship functionality from search results

Zee Media Bureau

Washington: Internet search engine giant Google has stopped showing names of authors associated with presented articles in search results.

The California-based company announced on its official authorship support page on Thursday, that it is eliminating the authorship mark-up as it found that the information isn't useful to its users as expected.

However search results will still include Google+ posts from friends and relevant Google+ pages.

The feature was launched in June 2011, with intentions to allow writers to claim their content and gain followers by presenting the author's work in search results.

An Author Rank feature also promised to help users filter out useless information by scoring the reputation of the author for providing reliable information, a report said.

But after a three-year experiment, the Web search giant concluded that the feature wasn't as valuable to readers as it had hoped and sometimes even posed as a distraction, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller wrote in a Google+ post Thursday.

In June, Google removed authors’ Google+ profile pictures from search results.

(With Agency Inputs)