This Week Google’s John Muller announced on Google+ that Google is removing authorship images and circle counts in the Google search results.

We’ve been doing lots of work to clean up the visual design of our search results, in particular creating a better mobile experience and a more consistent design across devices,” he wrote. “As a part of this, we’re simplifying the way authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results, removing the profile photo and circle count.

Up until now if you are verified your authorship through your Google+ account, your author photos displayed with Google circle counts in Google search results. While usability and eye-tracking tests have shown that having an image appearing in the search results increases click-through rates.

Mark Traphagen is shocked and he also pointed out in Google+ the Google authorship does not going anywhere.

Personally, it’s very sad to see drop of author photos in Google search results.

Yesterday, Google has announced that Gmail save your all attachments  to Google Drive from within your message and shown the new feature with a GIF image.

New feature is very convenient for Google Drive user – First, attachments are now visible as previews at the bottom of a message and secondly, Gmail user can instantly save an attachment to drive and accessible from all devices including smartphones and tablets. Gmail users on iOS and Android have already enjoying the attachment preview for quite some time, and but it’s added recently to the desktop.

Google says that the new feature will roll out over the next week.

Finally, Google has announced big list(s) of search quality updates for the past two months (August And September). Google made 65 changes in August and September.

This update major changes are Panda updates, page quality and ranking changes, snippet changes, improved knowledge graph.

Here are Google’s lists in their entirety:

Here’s the list for August:

• #82862. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
• #83197. [project “Autocomplete”] This launch introduced changes in the way we generate query predictions for Autocomplete.
• #83818. [project “Answers”] This change improved display of the movie showtimes feature.
• #83819. [project “Answers”] We improved display of the MLB search feature.
• #83820. [project “Answers”] This change improved display of the finance search feature.
• #83384. [project “Universal Search”] We made improvements to driving directions in Turkish.
• #83459. [project “Alternative Search Methods”] We added support for answers about new stock exchanges for voice queries.
• LTS. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We improved our web ranking to determine what pages are relevant for queries containing locations.
• Maru. [project “SafeSearch”] We updated SafeSearch to improve the handling of adult video content in videos mode for queries that are not looking for adult content.
• #83135. [project “Query Understanding”] This change updated term-proximity scoring.
• #83659. [project “Answers”] We made improvements to display of the local time search feature.
• #83105. [project “Snippets”] We refreshed data used to generate sitelinks.
• Imadex. [project “Freshness”] This change updated handling of stale content and applies a more granular function based on document age.
• #83613. [project “Universal Search”] This change added the ability to show a more appropriately sized video thumbnail on mobile when the user clearly expresses intent for a video.
• #83443. [project “Knowledge Graph”] We added a lists and collections component to the Knowledge Graph.
• #83442. [project “Snippets”] This change improved a signal we use to determine how relevant a possible result title actually is for the page.
• #83012. [project “Knowledge Graph] The Knowledge Graph displays factual information and refinements related to many types of searches. This launch extended the Knowledge Graph to English-speaking locales beyond the U.S.
• #84063. [project “Answers”] We added better understanding of natural language searches for the calculator feature, focused on currencies and arithmetic.
• nearby. [project “User Context”] We improved the precision and coverage of our system to help you find more relevant local web results. Now we’re better able to identify web results that are local to the user, and rank them appropriately.
• essence. [project “Autocomplete”] This change introduced entity predictions in autocomplete. Now Google will predict not just the string of text you might be looking for, but the actual real-world thing. Clarifying text will appear in the drop-down box to help you disambiguate your search.
• #83821. [project “Answers”] We introduced better natural language parsing for display of the conversions search feature.
• #82279. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We changed to fewer results for some queries to show the most relevant results as quickly as possible.
• #82407. [project “Other Search Features”] For pages that we do not crawl because of robots.txt, we are usually unable to generate a snippet for users to preview what’s on the page. This change added a replacement snippet that explains that there’s no description available because of robots.txt.
• #83709. [project “Other Ranking Components”] This change was a minor bug fix related to the way links are used in ranking.
• #82546. [project “Indexing”] We made back-end improvements to video indexing to improve the efficiency of our systems.
• Palace. [project “SafeSearch”] This change decreased the amount of adult content that will show up in Image Search mode when SafeSearch is set to strict.
• #84010. [project “Page Quality”] We refreshed data for the “Panda” high-quality sites algorithm. 
• #84083. [project “Answers”] This change improved the display of the movie showtimes search feature.
• gresshoppe. [project “Answers”] We updated the display of the flight search feature for searches without a specified destination.
• #83670. [project “Snippets”] We made improvements to surface fewer generic phrases like “comments on” and “logo” in search result titles.
• #83777. [project “Synonyms”] This change made improvements to rely on fewer “low-confidence” synonyms when the user’s original query has good results.
• #83377. [project “User Context”] We made improvements to show more relevant local results.
• #83484. [project “Refinements”] This change helped users refine their searches to find information about the right person, particularly when there are many prominent people with the same name.
• #82872. [project “SafeSearch”] In “strict” SafeSearch mode we remove results if they are not very relevant. This change previously launched in English, and this change expanded it internationally.
• Knowledge Graph Carousel. [project “Knowledge Graph”] This change expanded the Knowledge Graph carousel feature globally in English.
• Sea. [project “SafeSearch”] This change helped prevent adult content from appearing when SafeSearch is in “strict” mode.
• #84259. [project “Autocomplete”] This change tweaked the display of real-world entities in autocomplete to reduce repetitiveness. With this change, we don’t show the entity name (displayed to the right of the dash) when it’s fully contained in the query.
• TSSPC. [project “Spelling”] This change used spelling algorithms to improve the relevance of long-tail autocomplete predictions.
• #83689. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
• #84068. [project “Answers”] We improved the display of the currency conversion search feature.
• #84586. [project “Other Ranking Components”] This change improved how we rank documents for queries with location terms.

Here’s the list for September:

• Dot. [project “Autocomplete”] We improved cursor-aware predictions in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. Suppose you’re searching for “restaurants” and then decide you want “Italian restaurants.” With cursor-aware predictions, once you put your cursor back to the beginning of the search box and start typing “I,” the prediction system will make predictions for “Italian,” not completions of “Irestaurants.”
• #84288. [project “Autocomplete”] This change made improvements to show more fresh predictions in autocomplete for Korean.
• trafficmaps. [project “Universal Search”] With this change, we began showing a traffic map for queries like “traffic from A to B” or “traffic between A and B.”
• #84394. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
• #84652. [project “Snippets”] We currently generate titles for PDFs (and other non-html docs) when converting the documents to HTML. These auto-generated titles are usually good, but this change made them better by looking at other signals.
• #83761. [project “Freshness”] This change helped you find the latest content from a given site when two or more documents from the same domain are relevant for a given search query.
• #83406. [project “Query Understanding”] We improved our ability to show relevant Universal Search results by better understanding when a search has strong image intent, local intent, video intent, etc.
• espd. [project “Autocomplete”] This change provided entities in autocomplete that are more likely to be relevant to the user’s country. See blog post for background.
• #83391. [project “Answers”] This change internationalized and improved the precision of the symptoms search feature.
• #82876. [project “Autocomplete”] We updated autocomplete predictions when predicted queries share the same last word.
• #83304. [project “Knowledge Graph”] This change updated signals that determine when to show summaries of topics in the right-hand panel.
• #84211. [project “Snippets”] This launch led to better snippet titles.
• #81360. [project “Translation and Internationalization”] With this launch, we began showing local URLs to users instead of general homepages where applicable (e.g. blogspot.ch instead of blogspot.com for users in Switzerland). That’s relevant, for example, for global companies where the product pages are the same, but the links for finding the nearest store are country-dependent.
• #81999. [project “Translation and Internationalization”] We revamped code for understanding which documents are relevant for particular regions and languages automatically (if not annotated by the webmaster).
• Cobra. [project “SafeSearch”] We updated SafeSearch algorithms to better detect adult content.
• #937372. [project “Other Search Features”] The translate search tool is available through the link “Translated foreign pages” in the sidebar of the search result page. In addition, when we guess that a non-English search query would have better results from English documents, we’ll show a feature at the bottom of the search results page to suggest users try the translate search tool. This change improved the relevance of when we show the suggestion.
• #84460. [project “Snippets”] This change helped to better identify important phrases on a given webpage.
• #80435. [project “Autocomplete”] This change improves autocomplete predictions based on the user’s Web History (for signed-in users).
• #83901. [project “Synonyms”] This change improved the use of synonyms for search terms to more often return results that are relevant to the user’s intention.

What’s your views on these changes?

Google is now using DNS CNAME records to verify that you are the owner of your site or domain for Webmaster Tools. Google says new verification option will to those users who aren’t able to create DNS TXT records for their domains.

For using DNS CNAME record verification in Webmaster Tools, add your domain to your account and select your domain registrar option and then you will either see the instructions to set a CNAME record or see a link to the option CNAME record. Then click ‘verify’.

“When you click Verify, Google will check for the CNAME record and if everything works you will be added as a verified owner of the domain,” says Google software engineer Pooja Wagh. “Using this method automatically verifies you as the owner of all websites on this domain. For example, when you verify your ownership of example.com, you are automatically verified as an owner of www.example.com as well as subdomains such as blog.example.com.”

She also informed that webmaster can continue to use other verification methods like the HTML file, the meta tag or Google Analytics tag.

Google will be turning off is iGoogle, which allows users to personalize their Google homepage. Google announced they are shutting down a few services and products in near future including iGoogle which launched in 2005.

The product which will retire on November 1, 2013, giving users 16 months to adjust or export their data.

The other four services on Google’s spring cleaning shortlist include a Symbian search app, Google Talk Chatback (an embeddable Google Talk widget), Google Video, which long ago stopped taking new uploads, and Google Mini, part of Google’s enterprise search service.