Google Now Displays Author Names In Search Results

Amidst all the news about Google+, the search giant has pushed a major change to search results. It now highlights the people who create content that shows up in searches.

Google now allows content creators to tie their Google profiles with their content in searches. This is a huge plus (yeah I used plus) to content creators since search results will add more credibility to links and hence drive in more traffic. In a blog post Google said:

Authorship is a great way to identify and highlight high-quality content. Plus, the web is centered around people. People discovering content on the web often want to learn more about its author, see other content by that author, and even interact with the author.

Google has explained the technical details of linking your profile with your site on this help center page. Expect WordPress, Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr and other publishing sites to include a provision for this very soon. Of course what Google didn’t include was a provision to link to some other page instead of your Google profile. Google is using its dominance in the search market to force content creators to make and use only their Google profiles, which isn’t exactly following Google’s principle of being open.

This isn’t entirely surprising since Google profiles are now a part of Google+. If you already have access to Google+ try visiting profiles.google.com and you will be redirected to Google+.

Maybe in the future Google does allow content creators to link to their Twitter or Facebook profile, but it wouldn’t have taken much of an effort to include this on launch itself. Plus (again) looking back at Google and Facebook’s strained relations it seems unlikely that this would happen. Twitter? maybe. Although this feature is live on Google it is in its pilot phase and only a select few authors can avail the benefits of this feature. To see it in actions try searching for Danny Sullivan on Google, you would see his image and a link to his Google profile.