The days of Google Authorship have finally come to an end. The concept started as a way to show you the face and identity behind the content you were reading online. But then users starting clicking on the pretty faces instead of the paid ads, and that's something not to be tolerated by billion-dollar entities.

So Google officially ended the Rel=Author program.

"Unfortunately, we've also observed that this information isn't as useful to our users as we'd hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we've made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results," wrote Google's John Mueller on his + profile.

Not sure if that's his personal opinion or just an uninformed guess. Either way, it's all over.

"We also can't ignore the impact of the processing power used for this effort. We all like to think that Google has infinite processing power. It doesn't. If it did have such power, it would use optical character recognition to read text in images, image processing techniques to recognize pictures, speech to text technology to transcribe every video it encounters online, and it would crawl every page on the web every day, and so forth. But it doesn't," wrote Eric Enge, obviously hoping to be hired by Google very soon.

Google doesn't have enough power so they had to end authorship? Glad authorship is gone for Enge, at least.

What's the next advancement to go?