Web search giant Google has announced that its search results will no longer show the names of the writers related to the articles presented.
Launched in 2011, the feature aimed at allowing authors claim their content and earning followers by exhibiting the work of the author in search results. An Author Rank feature as well promised to assist users filter out useless information by scoring the author’s reputation for offering worthy information.
According to a Google+ post written by John Mueller, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google concluded after a three-year experiment that the feature was not worthy to users as it has wished and at times even caused a distraction.
Mueller further added: “We have received many feedbacks from each kind of user and webmaster and have updated, tweaked and perfected recognition and display of authorship information. Unfortunately, we have also seen that this feature is not quite useful to our readers, as we had hoped. With this in mind, we have decided to make the difficult decision of halting authorship display in search results.”
According to Mueller, the removal of writer information did not seem to increase clicks on ads or reduce traffic to websites thus the change would not affect Google+ posts from friends.
Google has in the last couple of months been moving gradually within this direction.