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The two results you're referring to, the ones with people's names and photos next to them, are blog posts where people have used the rel=author markup to link their blog to their Google+ profile. That can influence rankings. I don't think anyone is sure how much influence we're talking about; part of the problem is that the people adopting this new markup are probably already doing good basic SEO stuff, so correlation and causation can get mixed up. In any case, it's likely that this author markup will become more influential in the future, so adopting it now is a no-brainer.