Several Italian SEO practitioners have noted seeing Google search results with snippets about double the normal length1.
Google’s query result snippet (the result summary or description) is usually around 150 characters or so. It may be the contents of a page’s html meta description tag, especially if the tag contains the search keywords, or an abstract created by Google from the page’s content.
I hadn’t seen this behavior in English language Google results until I made a very specific search where I used more than the typical 2 or 3 keywords seasoned searchers type. Searching for google feedburner mybrand server not found (no, Google’s feedburner migration did not go smoothly) I noticed that the 4th and successive results had super long descriptions – around 300 characters or so:
The determining factor in triggering long descriptions seems to be the length of the search query. The longer the query, the greater the number of results containing an expanded snippet description and the greater the length of the results descriptions in general. A few examples follow:
| Query | Query Word Length | Query Character Length | Max Number of lines seen in search results snippets |
|---|---|---|---|
| google feedburner migration | 3 | 27 | 2 |
| google feedburner migration mybrand | 4 | 35 | 3 |
| google feedburner migration mybrand server | 5 | 42 | 4 |
| google feedburner mybrand server not found | 7 | 52 | 4 |
| official barack obama website | 4 | 29 | 2 |
| show official barack obama website | 5 | 34 | 3 |
| show me official barack obama website | 6 | 37 | 4 |
Most searchers enter just a few words in their searches – they quickly find that natural language queries such as “where can I buy the latest tiziano ferro cd” are unwieldy to type and tend to limit results too much.
The question arises: is this a current Google test or is it a recent Google feature that we don’t normal encounter as we normally restrict our searches to two or three keywords?
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Sean Carlos is a web marketing consultant & teacher, assisting companies with their Search (SEO + PPC = SEM), Social Media & Digital Media Measurement strategies. Sean first worked with text indexing in 1990 in a project for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since then he worked for Hewlett-Packard Consulting and later as IT Manager of a real estate website before founding Antezeta in 2006. Sean is an 
I can confirm that descriptions are getting huge!! Have a look for the following silly example:
“can i have 2 cars in one garage?”.
The query is not that long (main keywords are “2, cars, 1, garage”) but the total number of words is 8 and this give very long snippets.
These longer snippets seem like they are definitely a new feature of Google’s results. We’re seeing them pretty consistently for longer search queries all over the U.S. and it looks like it’s been going on for a while with some results reported as far back as November of last year.
http://www.morevisibility.com/seoblog/long-description-snippets-in-google-search-results.html. As you say, since they only seem to appear for longer search queries, it’s not that noticeable.