Is Google Shortening Their Snippet Character Limit?

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August 10, 2007

Is Google Shortening Their Snippet Character Limit?

A DigitalPoint Forums thread is reporting signs of Google shortening their snippet text from about 150 characters to 95 characters.

The snippet is the portion of text Google typically pulls from your meta description tag or from content on your page that makes up the text found under the title of your page in the Google.com search results. I have boxed in the snippet in the image below.

Now, I am currently not able to reproduce this behavior on my computer. But there are three different people in the thread supporting this finding. But since I cannot reproduce it, I personally cannot confirm this is happening.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

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posted rustybrick in Google Search Engine at August 10, 2007 7:35 AM Comments (2)

Comments

The snippet can also be extracted from DMOZ, in that case it can be less than 95 characters: http://www.google.com/search?q=orkut

Posted by TOMHTML at August 10, 2007 09:00

Maybe you can help me w/ a question I have about Google's snippets...i got into a slight argument with a blog owner who said the snippet that came up under his URL on a Google search was not anywhere written on his blog. He thinks it somehow came from the indexing process....but isn't sure. It's an issue because the snippet describes the blog in a way he thinks is wrong (i.e., he claims he didn't write it).

So, I guess the question is: where does the snippet come from?

thanks

Posted by brian at August 22, 2007 01:06

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