So we like assuming Google is super smart: It knows what synonyms are, it can detect unnatural language, it can understand the page markup and identify which part of it is more important (content-heavy) and which part is purely navigational (sidebar), etc, etc

I was reading this article by AJ Kohn on how reading can influence your author rank and came across this interesting find...

Apart from being rather pro-active in encouraging content providers to verify their content authorship, Google has recently upgraded its "Rich Snippet testing" tool trying to suggest possible authors of the article:

And, what I found quite funny, Google's "genius" way to identify the author is based on an absolutely stupid formula:

• Google finds "By" appearing wherever on the page;
• Google makes sure there are at least two (Capitalized) words following the preposition;
• Based on that, Google assumes that must be an author:

Come on!