"We all like to think that Google has infinite processing power. They don’t. If they did have such power, they would use optical character recognition to read text in images, image processing techniques to recognize pictures, speech to text technology to transcribe every video they encounter online, and they would crawl every page on the web every day, and so forth, but they don’t."
I am actually pretty certain Google does most (if not all) of that. Thus, I doubt this has anything to do with processing power - after all, it's not that much additional data.
As with any other "known, positive" ranking signal, mostly SEO-savvy sites implemented rel="author" markup. However, Google must have anticipated this, so it's probably something else.
Overall, I'm actually surprised Google relied on explicit markup to accurately detect authorship. They are probably able to do so anyway. Maybe the purpose was just another push for Google+?
I am actually pretty certain Google does most (if not all) of that. Thus, I doubt this has anything to do with processing power - after all, it's not that much additional data.
As with any other "known, positive" ranking signal, mostly SEO-savvy sites implemented rel="author" markup. However, Google must have anticipated this, so it's probably something else.
Overall, I'm actually surprised Google relied on explicit markup to accurately detect authorship. They are probably able to do so anyway. Maybe the purpose was just another push for Google+?