The rise and fall of AuthorRank
https://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975
In class we discusses multiple ways of ranking search results such as in-link voting, and the more effective page rank system. This PageRank system while good is not the best for all markets. One of the marginal groups are authors. While it seems like the internet would be a great place for author’s to publish their work due to the broad audience. However, the PageRank system buries these types of work in the web search and makes it very difficult for authors field and audience for their work.
Authorship, a form of Author Rank was googles attempt at giving their marginalized authors a chance to be heard. Google’s authorship allowed author’s to add their signature to boost their value in the search system. This signature is then used to create a profile for the author. This was noble effort to improve the search engine, though it ultimately failed and was removed for Google’s search engine. The first major issue this ranking system, was it was only adopted by a third of authors. Second, Google found that this system was not effective in finding users the webpages they were looking for. While Google’s Authorship program was an interesting attempt at adapting the PageRank search algorithm to provide better results and failed, it still demonstrates an interesting adjustment to the PageRank system that could further be improved or developed in the future or may be found to be more effective in other mediums.