Google announced that they will no longer show authorship results on any given Google search and will no longer be tracking the data produced using a rel=authorship markup. Google is extremely set in its ways with testing their new ideas and products; however none of them are above Google’s evaluation method. If a product or service is not meeting Google’s expectations of user adoption and user value, it will be discontinued. This is the major reason why Google has ended its authorship program, there were very few users and those users that did exist usually installed and used authorship incorrectly.
Part of the reason Google authorship was scarcely used was that most non-tech savvy users found the coding to be overwhelming and too complex for them to try and install. Google’s next step was to use an auto-attribution system; however the major problem with the program was that it was highly inaccurate sometimes saying that the author of an article had passed away long before the article was ever written.
Google Authorship’s picture snippets next to articles was supposed to increase clicks, however data shows that the author’s picture next to an article still doesn’t provide enough value to users for them to click on an article solely based on a photo being next to it.