Google’s new guide on how to add name authority (that shows up in Google Search results) to your online articles or blog posts. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to rely on you signing up with Google’s Facebook-challenger Google+.

Lifehacker has instructions on how to prevent Google+ from distorting your Google Search results.

So, now we know why journalist name authority was removed from Google News results. The evil curse of Google+ -ification of search…

“Google+ is the new SEO. Just look at what it’s done to Google News. In the name of highlighting authors, it now pulls in Google+ profiles [from Google’s new competitor to Facebook]. It doesn’t let the author choose, say, her own website as her profile. If she wants a clickable, personal link on Google News, she has to use Google+.”

I have no problem with Google trying to take on Facebook (competition is something which seems to be destined to improve Facebook, a service I intend to stick with). But the Google+ and other distortions of search results are becoming very annoying.

A new Google feature you might have missed in the rush to Christmas. Google has a new “Verbatim” option, which bypasses the appallingly dumb second-guessing that gives results that assume “and” is what you meant when you typed “India”, or that “biography” is what you meant when you typed “bibliography”…

With Verbatim turned on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making improvements such as…

* making automatic spelling corrections

* personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before

* including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])

* finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to “floral delivery” when you search [flower shops])

* searching for words with the same stem like “running” when you’ve typed [run]

* making some of your terms optional, like “circa” in [the scarecrow circa 1963]

Great though this is to see, it confirms that people who actually want to do proper search are now second-class citizens in the Googlesphere.

Google has announced it is opening up the citations at Google Scholar.

Interesting. It appears that Google Book Search hasn’t added any new books since the end of December 2009. Or at least, it looks that way if you filter by date. Go to Book Search, select Custom Range… 1/1/2010 to 10/10/2011. Select a common term such as “author” or “genre” or “2011”. No results whatsoever, except from U.S. magazines. The search-by-date function seems to be broken, as searching for “2011”, without a date range set in the sidebar, throws up textbooks published in mid 2010 and late 2010 (e.g.: such as “Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac: Visual QuickStart”).

Did you know you can create and share a custom-search ‘channel’ on Google News? Google News Directory.