Cutts says Google wants to show the titles that it thinks are most useful. "For example, suppose the title of your page is ‘Untitled’ or if there is no title. If that’s the case, we try to show a relevant, useful title."

"We reserve the right to try to figure out what’s a better title, what’s a more descriptive title or snippet to show the users," he continues.

According to Cutts, if you have a title that’s really long, they may still use that in their scoring, but in the snippet, they might try to find a "better title." This is presumably based on what the user is looking for.

As Cutts has said in the past, sometimes Google will use snippets right from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Sometimes, they’ll simply use snippets from the page or the meta description tag. "We do a bunch of different things to find the best description that we can," he says.

"If you have a bad title or a title that we don’t think helps users as much, we can try to find a better title, and one we think will be an informative result so that users will know whether that’s a good result for them to click on," he says.

Have you noticed Google changing your titles? Did they find better ones? Discuss here.

Related Articles:

> Why Your Email Address May Show up in Google Search Results

> Why Your Robots.txt Blocked URLs May Show up in Google

> Does Google Recognize the Name of Your Business?

Original Article: It appears that the effects of Google’s Caffeine update may be felt sooner rather than later. That is if you really do feel the effects at all.

What are your thoughts on Google’s Caffeine update? Discuss here.

If you are unfamiliar with Caffeine, it is an algorithm update that Google announced in the summer. Upon the announcement, Google’s Matt Cutts said, "The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there.  Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all.  This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure." Cutts told WebProNews about Caffeine in the following interview:

When Caffeine was introduced, so was a sandbox, where people could play around with Caffeine based search results, and get a look at how rankings were altered (if at all), and try to get a feel for how it was going to go. Now that sandbox has closed up shop, it looks like the Caffeine update will be live in Google search before too long. It will start after the holidays at least though.

"I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays," says Cutts on his blog. "Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays."

The announcement at what used to be the Caffeine sandbox reads:

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

Of course as people tested Caffeine via the sandbox, many of them blogged about their results and findings. The general consensus seemed to be that Caffeine is fast and utilizes real-time search a great deal. Given Google’s frequent announcements related to speed, and a recently announced deal with Twitter, speed and real-time search seem like logical updates to Google search results.

When SEOBook’s Aaron Wall tested Caffeine, he said he thought there was:

- an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages + Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority and sorta spammy on page text

- perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names

- perhaps a bit better understanding of related words / synonyms

- tuning down some of the exposure for video & some universal search results

This stuff should not necessarily be taken as gospel. These are just the results and speculations of individuals from tests of a product that was only introduced (for testing purposes), let alone finalized. It is what it is.

As the Caffeine update rolls out, there will no doubt be more and more mystery unraveled as search industry professionals scramble to stay ahead of the game, and Google drops subtle hints from time to time. It’s going to be interesting to see where Caffeine takes the world’s most popular search engine.

Have you tested Caffeine? What do you think about the update? Share your findings here.

Related Articles:

> Matt Cutts Talks Google Caffeine Update

> Where’s Bing’s Real-Time Search?

> Facebook/Twitter Use May Now Mean More for Google/Bing Rankings

"On our new search page, if a searcher types in a phrase such as ‘buy pink floyd’, he can further refine his search results by clicking on links on the left-hand side of the page, which include sites that users often find useful. If the user clicks on one of the suggested sites, he’ll get a smaller set of results from that domain only," explains Yahoo’s Jeff Hecox. "Now, if the user selects a site that is also a Sponsored Search advertiser, that advertiser’s ad should still be displayed in the new set of results."

Don’t worry about competing ads in these cases. If a user searches for "buy pink floyd" as described above, they can choose "Amazon.com" to filter the results and get only Amazon results, for example. The only paid results that would show would be for Amazon, Hecox says.

So in other words, this will only affect you as an advertiser if you have a site that is actually used in Yahoo’s filtering options. So the question is, how do I get my site to be listed as a filtering option? Yahoo says that the domains its system uses to filter results are chose based on a number of factors, such as their listings’ quality, popularity, and user response.

For smaller advertisers, this may be a hard nut to crack. However, as far as users are concerned, Yahoo deems this a way to increase relevancy and user control of the search experience.

The move is just one of Yahoo’s new ways of creating more opportunities for its bigger advertisers. Another was demonstrated by the creation of the Vitality campaign for General Mills, which illustrates how you can bring existing content together to target a demographic and then serve ads to that same demographic.

"In the past, the only way to view these documents was to download them and open them in a separate viewer application," says Google. "To provide an alternative, we made it possible to quickly and easily view these files as HTML right in a web browser by clicking ‘View as HTML.’ This was an improvement, but unfortunately the ‘View as HTML’ option loses some of the formatting from the original PDF, such as graphics, tables, fonts and other elements."

The new links are based on the same technology that is used by Google Docs and Gmail. Google says they’ve actually been rolling out the feature in search results since July, and now they have more than half of the PDFs in their index available this way.

When you click the "Quick View" link, it will open the PDF in your browser, and will look something like this:

Google recently gave webmasters a new way to display PDFs (as well as PPTs and TIFFs). They launched the Google Docs Viewer, which displays these types of files directly in a user’s web browser without requiring a download. The tool for this can be found here. 

"Spiffy features are great, but if they’re wrong or don’t trigger in some reasonable way that your mind can predict, the failure is worse somehow," says Google’s Cutts on his blog. "The same holds true with the organic search results: a catastrophic search failure can stick in your mind much more than the 200 searches that worked well. Search quality evaluation is tricky because you need to take that factor plus hundreds more into account. It’s taken years for Google to really evaluate our quality well, and we still continue to learn important new things."

Are you more likely to remember searches that worked well or ones that didn’t? Comment here.

Searchers expect greatness. It’s not even something they consider. They just expect to get what they want. It’s only when they don’t get it that they really notice. But what does it take for a search engine to keep a user from noticing a flaw? What goes into providing quality results?

The search quality team for the most widely used search engine in the world has given a tremendous amount of insight in a series of lengthy interviews with the publication BusinessWeek.

Cutts says Google’s strategy for search quality is a balance of the analytical and serendipity. This comes from a cross between a lot of evaluation metrics and a lot of feedback from both the inside and the outside. Google gets tons of feedback from users, but the search quality team also gets tons of feedback right from within the company. Cutts says they have a mailing list comprised of about 20,000 Google employees who are always complaining and leaving feedback.

The human element steps in in a variety of ways. Cutts says that when he is just out and about on his own time, he will come across places, things, and sites that he will look up to find out what kind of results Google delivers for them, and looks for ways to improve this. He says that Google has gotten better at things like spelling, morphology, synonyms, stemming ("where somebody types in ‘runners’ and maybe they meant ‘runner,’ or ‘running’"), etc.

"We ran over 5,000 experiments last year," Google’s Udi Mamber told BusinessWeek. "Probably 10 experiments for every successful launch. We launch on the order of 100 to 120 a quarter. We have dozens of people working just on the measurement part. We have statisticians who know how to analyze data, we have engineers to build the tools. We have at least five or 10 tools where I can go and see here are five bad things that happened."

Google may rely on the human element to some extent, but don’t take that to mean that more emphasis is placed on this than the machine element. Cutts says Google certainly relies much more on computers and algorithms than any other major search engine (at least historically). He does reiterate a point he has made in the past, however, and that is that Google has become more willing to listen to feedback.

Google’s strategy for improving search results consists of a mixture of humans, formulas, and experiments. These are the elements that it takes to deliver what Cutts says are fresher and more comprehensive results than those from other search engines.

Do you agree with Cutts that Google delivers "fresher and more comprehensive" results? Share your thoughts.

Today the company announced that it has added 9 new options. Some of these you may already be familiar with, because they have been rolling out gradually for a while. Google says they will now be available globally (in English) by the end of the day.

The options include:

- Past hour
- Specific date range
- More shopping sites
- Fewer shopping sites
- Visited pages
- Not yet visited
- Books
- Blogs
- News

The options are pretty self-explanatory, but it should be noted that the past hour is the closest thing Google has to a real-time search option. At least, that is the closest thing they have to a clickable option. A while back, Ran Geva of Omgili pointed out that you can alter the URL to get results from within a minute or even within a second.

These search options are not the only new features for Google search results. The company also just announced that it is now featuring more forum links underneath forum-based results.

Now SEO professionals are teaming up to try and influence natural search results that would ordinarily bring up links to these scammers, to instead include articles warning of its existence. This is being referred to as "White Knight SEO." (HT: Matt McGee)

Google knows about the scammers, and has even posted warnings about them to their company blog, but some wonder why they they are still letting advertisers target keywords like "Google Cash." These ads may not be scams, but it certainly creates some confusion.

"I am more than a little surprised by those defending Googles (lack) of action here. How hard would it be for Google to prevent ads from showing on the keyword ‘Google Money Tree’ or ‘Google Cash?’" asks Jonah Stein, (who coined the term "White Knight SEO") in a comment at Search Engine Land. He has written about the topic in Google’s Cash Cow – Scam Advertising & Profits, as have David Rodnitzky in Alert – Google Cash Scam and Johnathan Hochman in Google Turns Blind Eye to Scam Ads.

It looks like the "White Knights" have prevailed though, because the organic results all appear to be in reference to Google Cash as a scam. As McGee points out, usually Google doesn’t like these organized efforts to influence results, but perhaps considering the cause, they will let this one slide.