Improved Google results - Longer snippets for longer search terms & related terms

In its never ending efforts to make search more relevant and easy, Google today added two new features to its search.

1. Longer snippets for search terms longer than three keywords.

2. Better related searches suggestions

Why longer snippets ?

Before anything a little clarification. Many people have mis understood the first improvement – longer snippets. Some websites have reported that Google has completely changed its snippet length for all searches.(may be their official blog post had to be a bit more clear.) In fact, its not so.

For longer search terms with three or more words, Google thinks it makes sense to provide longer snippets with more text from the webpage.

The reason : When someone searches with longer terms (long tail keywords as they’re called) its likely that they are looking for information that’s not readily available and requires a lot more “mix and match” process with the page/site content.

Hence the longer snippet.

The snippet length for normal queries (less than three words) still has the same old snippet length.

More related search terms

I really like the second improvement. For search phrases, Google will now provide more related search terms (seen in highlighted text below the page) with more accuracy and for more terms (which didn’t have the related terms suggestion.) And this actually works fine so far.

Official announcement here.