"Google+ is absolutely about identity. Why? Because it is vital in supporting both search and advertising. The explosion of digital content has made it increasingly difficult to quickly identify and surface quality content. It's difficult, even for someone with the processing power of Google, to perform document level analysis. Identity and authorship provide Google with a new way to sort web documents, not by starting at the document level, but by starting at the author level. AuthorRank could be a powerful way to reduce marginal content and scrapers - the issues that so many have been howling about.  If interested, I wrote up my thoughts on this about a month ago here: http://www.blindfiveyearold.co..." - AJ Kohn