Google removes authorship from search results

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.

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).

Whoever wins, we lose.

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.

Power users probably. They're disproportionately likely either to use it themselves, or to recognize authors at a glance.

I am. My sites traffic went way up after adding authorship to my posts.

I dunno! I don't use it either way. There's a lot of people in the post comments with opinions, though.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

At the very least, it's successful for Google, since they appear to be making some money from it.