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Yes, Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts did say rel=author can help search quality but he did also say Google is currently not using it.
John Mueller, a Google web trends analysts confirmed this one more time during a Google Hangout a few days ago. He said:
We don’t use Authorship for ranking
Mark Traphagen transcribed that part of the question. Which you can see in the video at 48 minutes and 24 seconds into the video.
Q: Why can't Google+ authorship prevent scraper sites from showing up above us in the search results?
John Mueller: Well, we don't use authorship for ranking, so it's not... because it's written by a well-known author, or it looks like it might have been written by a well-known author, that we'd show it higher up in the search results....
Q: Could you repeat that once more...
JM: We don't use it for ranking, at the moment. If you're seeing a situation where scraper sites are showing up above you, that's something that I would treat separately from any authorship markup that we have on your pages....
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
