There has been a lot of buzz that author authority is going to be the next biggest thing in search. I do agree that it is a strong symbol and Google have already started giving credit to authors for a particular article, blogpost or website content. The move is really appreciated. The digital era needs to have author authority as people share a lot of content online through social media websites as well as other online resources. The author authority signal is going to be much stronger in the upcomming days.
The Google search for “Google+ ford” gave me the following result:
The above search result might have been caused due to a glitch in Google database or it might be part of their testing to include author images along with search results. Let us wait and see what Google does. I am sure that author authority is already a strong signal even if the author image is not displayed along with the search.