Google found an interesting way to use the authorship data it has obtained. As you probably noticed, many search results from news sites and blogs include the name of the author and link to the corresponding Google Profile. There’s also a link that lets you restrict the results to the pages written by an author: “more by [author name]”.
Now Google adds 3 search results from the same author after you visit a page, spend some time reading it (more than 2 minutes?) and then go back to the search results. Google doesn’t know if you actually liked the page, but it assumes that you found it useful because you haven’t gone back to the search results page after a few seconds.
Here’s a screenshot that shows a regular Google search result enhanced with authorship data:
… and this is what happens after visiting the page, reading the article and going back to Google’s SERP.
“If a user visits an article by an author and it seems like they’d be interested in finding more articles by this author, when they click the ‘Back’ button to return to the results page, we’ll show more results by that author,” explains Google.
The results added by Google aren’t always useful and sometimes they aren’t even related to your query. For example, the 3 links from this screenshot send you to a search results page from Ars Technica, a page that includes some other articles from the same author and the Google+ profile page.
{ via Search Engine Land }
