Submission + - Google drops authorship with picture from search results.
The "Authorship" feature, which rolled out in 2011 as another part of the Google+ social and real name marketing push, had its author profile pictures pulled from the search results in June this year. The remainder of the feature is now finally dead, with little fanfare.
Emil Protalinski at thenextweb.com (note the importance of author?) reports:
Google today stopped showing authorship in search results, meaning articles will no longer include a link to the Google+ profile of their author. The company says that it found the information isn’t as useful to its users as it hoped, and in some cases even distracts from the overall search results.