New Improvements to Google's Search Results Page Today Google introduced two new improvements to their results page: better search refinements and longer snippets. Especially the latter feature has interesting repercussions for SEO's. The first improvement, better search refinements, is "a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search" and should give you more relevant choices for refining your search query. It's an indication that Google's algorithms are getting better at determining the context of a search query, as well as the context of website content. Automatically judging the proper context of a piece of content is considered the holy grail of the semantic web, so it'll be interesting to see how Google will continue to develop this new technology. The second improvement is very interesting for search engine optimizers: longer content snippets. For queries of three words or more, Google will now sometimes show three lines of content from the website instead of two. This allows users to more properly judge if a website contains information relevant to the search query before they click the link. Longer snippets give SEO's more opportunities to gain clickthroughs from search results by making the snippets more relevant to the query. The question remains, where does Google take the snippet text from? Will it be the webpage's content or its meta tags? Should we now lenghten the text we put in the description meta tag? We'll have to wait and see how this new feature will affect clickthrough rates on search engine results pages. CommentGoogle indexes SVG0 comments  According to the Google Webmaster Blog, Google is now indexing .SVG, (Scalable Vector Graphics) presented as an alternative to Flash. But who besides wikipedia actuall...... read more
Semetis develops its rich media ...0 comments
BRUSSELS,
1 September 2010 – Search and web analytics agency Semetis today announced the
launch of a new interactive marketing concept, a premiere on the Belgian
market.
Semetis channel on YouTube is fully dedicated to video
content related to search marketing and web analytics. In the past, Semetis had
already posted more than 20 videos with useful information and tips. As from
now, Semetis will post video tutorials on a weekly basis on its YouTube brand
channel.
Startin...... read more
Google combating cowboy agencies4 comments  Google today announced they are changing the rules on how their partner agencies are to be working with AdWords accounts/advertisers. In order to combat non-transparen...... read more
Google Grants Belgium looking fo...1 comment 
Brussels, Tuesday 20
July 2010 - David Gillain, Agency Manager at Google Belgium launched today an
appeal to all Belgian Search agencies looking for volunteers i...... read more
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Comments (2)
Interesting development indeed. I think Google will take most of the text in the snippet from the page itself.
With longer queries I think it will often be the case that it matches with a page which has more content than an average page has.
Therefore it is probable that Google takes the matching text from the page and put it in the snippet.
When you target a specific, longer query with a page and you don't have a lot of content on that page, I think it would be smart to add a longer meta description.
Another way to look at Google's search result improvements is that they want to keep you on their (ad based) property. With better refinements and a longer snippet, you will spend more time on the SERP, which increases the chance for clicking an ad.
Wo 25 mrt 2009, 11:35
We've been doing similar things at Duck Duck Go (http://duckduckgo.com/) to these new Google changes. In particular, we put zero-click info, e.g. topic summaries, on top of links. We also also put an explore box with related topics above links. For example check out http://duckduckgo.com/?q=futurama
Our snippets and related topics are not algorithmically driven, however. Instead they are based on human edited sources, e.g. Wikipedia and Crunchbase (and many others). Consequently, they are more relevant and make more sense than Google's info. We also have more semantic properties, such as ambiguous keyword detection, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=apple, which of course Google does not.
See http://duckduckgo.com/about.html for some more examples. Of course, we'd love your feedback on what we're doing.
Gabriel Weinberg, Founder & CEO
Do 26 mrt 2009, 01:01